FREE BEER!

so after two and half years of hard work and dedication to the place, i am finally VIP at the Kilkenny Irish Pub here in calgary. For those of you that dont know about the kilk, with the exception of the Haufbrau (spelling?) House in Munich, the kilkenny is probably one of the best pubs you can treat yourself to. Great food, great drinks, great servers, and just a great cozy irish atmosphere makes for one...well....great pub. And now, after many hours have been spent unravelling the mysteries of the universe over pint after pint of brew, i finally have been upgraded to VIP status. $2.50 off every drink (k maybe its not free beer...but that was just a ploy to get your attention). nice. nice. I guess some thanks are in order...

First of i'd like to thank my mom...she always believed in me and knew i could do it, even when sometimes i didnt think i had it in me. I'd also like to thank my dad for first showing me how to grip a beer bottle properly. Deep thanks goes out to all those clowns at all those bush parties growing up...i could never have gotten here without you, thanks guys. Thanks to my favorite server Katie expecially for finally giving me the honor. And finally, thanks to all you friends out there who never gave up on me and never said no when i sincerely asked "shall we go home to the kilk?" you have each in your own way made this feat possible, enjoyable and memorable (ok...some nights the memory is a little lacking...but apparantly those were my finest moments)...there are too many of you to list here, but you know who you are...

oh yeah...and on a more seriouse note, about the last post...yeah i definitly crashed and burned. that ship has now sailed....oh well. such is life. its probably for the best anyways.

Reality is like a big vicious dragon....only i dont believe in dragons.

Im walking to school. Its a wonderful morning. I'm in high spirits. Then something ahead grabs my attention. Its this black cat that iv never seen around before...not just any black cat, this thing was evil looking...like if satan had a cat, it would be this one...and this cat is crossing the street. Its about twenty meters or so ahead of me. It sees me, stops in the middle of the road, and just zones it on me. Then it just stares at me while i walk past on my way to the university, and after i pass it i look back, and its still watching me. k....a little creepy, but nothing seriouse. I get on with my day.

I go home for lunch. As i'm about to turn and head into my walkway to my front door i see it again. sitting on the hood of this car, just staring at me. If looks could kill, i may not be alive writing this right now. but still...a little odd...nothing more.

I make myself a lunch and sit down to eat. I like to have the sunlight shining through our kitchen window whenever possible so before i start chowing down i open the blinds...yeah and what do i see? That bloody cat again! This time it walked around the house, jumped up on the deck, and was just staring at my window, as if expecting me to open the blinds so it could glare at me one more time. This time however it got a little bit creepy. It just looked at me in the eyes for a minute or two, then the hairs on its back shot up, it crouched down and starting hissing at me. Not a loud or long hiss...just a short evil one...after which it turned and bolted for the back alley as if it were all of a sudden terrified of me, and dissapeared out of sight, never to be seen again.

Wierd.

The wheels driving those hands on the walls have stoped turning, putting emphasis on the ones in my head that are rapidly going out of control...

the seconds have turned into days hours ago...

the operation went well...and now all i can do is try to relax around the house, helplessly watching the seconds gradually tick by as the four hour time frames that seperate me from another Codiene dose ever so slowly draws to a close. 33 minutes to go until midnight.....and i'm almost positive the batteries on all the clocks in this house just stopped working. the seconds have turned into days hours ago. its going to be another rough night...

...well now its 4:00 in the morning and i cant sleep and as i'm sure your well aware there isnt much to do at this time of day so i'm adding to this post...just took another 12 mL of that revolting liquid slime. in about a half hour i may be able to get some more rest...i'm looking forward to dawn. the nights are so empty.

Troy you found your way home. Your own painful short-cut to heaven....and we're all still down here on earth....wandering.

Well today was the day we celebrated my brothers birthday, and more specifically my brothers life. Unfortunately he couldnt celebrate it with us...he died the year i was born. I never got to meet him, but a life apart will be nothing compared to an eternity together. some day i'll meet my older bro...i'm definitly looking forward to it. From what my parents and older siblings say he was quite the amazing guy. He couldnt be here with us now but thats ok, i know he's partying it up with God, Jesus, and all the angels and saints in heaven...besides, we're not quite sure if the cake is going to turn out very well anyways.

I'd like to share a poem Troy wrote a few weeks before he died..at this point he knew it wasnt much longer before all his pain would go away....before his tumor would end his life. Troy was 15 when he wrote this. He was brilliant. Had God not called him home at such a young age, he would be 35 years old today. But i know the excrutiating pain he had to endure was all worth it...he's been in heaven for nearly 20 years.

Troy called this poem "The Wanderer"

The pony sleeps fitfully
watching the night sky for something
not knowing why,
anticipating the unknown event.

Feeling the tension in the air he picks up his head
in time to catch a small glimpse
of a shiny missile of light
that scourched the heaven for but a moment.

A wayward wanderer,
a tramp in the universe,
a free entity,
a powerful creature,
and now a cloud of dust.

These proud remains fall into the sea
confuse an octupus
irratate a shark
and then sink to the bottom

where it joins a myraid other meteors
in the great burial plot of the heavens
at the bottom of the ocean.

and the pony sensing something,
nods his head towards the water.
Last respects paid to the wanderer.

and then gets up and wanders on himself,
in search of food and shelter;
the company of a noisy bullfrog singing in the night
the clicking of crickets
and the first notes of a fresh sparrow
greeting the new day.

He nips off a young shoot of grass
and savouring the fresh green flavour
procedes to investigate the lone tree
he sees in the distance.

It seems to beckon him,
calling him foreward
to cover the unknown ground
and experience that yet unexperienced.

Newly innocent,
there is much in life to see.
Savor time while it lasts;
for it too shall pass the way of the wanderer.

Hope you enjoyed that. Well this will be my last post for a while. Tomorow i go in for surgery....supposedly there is a small chance i may never wake up from my surgery...perhaps i'll get the oppertunity to meet Troy earlier than expected. If it is over a year and this is still the last post on this site...then that is indeed what happened. However, the chance of that happening is very small. So for the next few days i'm planning on being outta commision and just laying in bed feeling terrible. should be good. if all goes well, i plan on writing again in a few days.

Diamonds and Drugs

Ok so heres a rather funny childhood story that i thought i'd share just cuz i didnt know what else to post. It happened in grade 3 or something...maybe grade 4....whichever it was the important part is that i was still a young buck, very young, and easily manipulated by things i had taken in from my surrounding...including, it seems, girls, and jewlery commercials on TV.

So we'll say it was grade 3, you know, that age where you can understand things and think for yourself and make your own decisions, but you still needed guidance...lots of guidance. So, like pretty much every elementary school, we were learning that drugs and alcohol were bad. But in order to keep a grade 3 kid interested you need to do fun things, like posters! oh how i loved to draw posters. i was good...real good....for a young buck that is. What, apparently, i wasnt good at, was listening to instructions. So theres my teacher, Miss. Star Caldwell, giving all of us little tikes instructions on how the theme for our posters is "Dont do drugs", but if we stick to that theme we can draw whatever our little hearts desire. and there i am, off in my own little world, probably daydreaming about Holly Baird or Trina Bradshaw (the two loves of my life back in elementary school...except this was seriouse...i was in love, several times, with each of them, sometimes at the same time)....maybe thats what led to my idea for my poster...but i, and no one else, will ever be sure. So i completely missed the instructions and my teacher started handing out poster paper. This of course got me excited. "oooo golly! we get to draw again today??? YES!"

But by this time in my life i knew that we dont just draw for fun, nope, theres always a reason why the teachers hand out that big poster paper, and theres always certain things you need to draw on it. So i start asking my fellow classmates (probably Holly and Trina first)

"so....babe....those are wonderful wax crayons you have there...what are we supposed to draw?" (oh yes...i was smooth).

Now it seems that everyone in my class didnt know me as well as they should have by now, because they thought i meant "what are we supposed to draw on the topic of Drugs and Alcohol?" so they just replied

"oh anything you want Mark."

Now i was confused! we never got to draw anything we wanted, that was back in the good 'ol days of kindergarten...this is grade 3, this is seriouse business. so i go ask the teacher

"so...ummmm...what do i draw?" who once again underestimated my ignorance and replied
"oh anything you want mark, its up to you."

now i was extatic! anything?!? really anything??? finally this poster had my complete and utter attention. There were 30 kids around me creating works of art but i didnt seem to notice that all of them had the same theme. i was in my own little word. i got to draw whatever i wanted! now before i go on to say what i drew you have to understand that i had just learned to draw diamonds and i was very impressed with my skills in that specific area of art. so this was going to be a grand picture indeed. oh ya, and all our posters were going in for a poster contest and they were going to be hung up on the wall at the high school!!! wow, the high school! this had to be a good poster, old people were going to be walking by it everyday.

i think we got a full hour to do it, maybe more. all i know is that for that hour i didnt look up once from my page - not once to notice that everyone around me, all the other kids in my class, just happened to want to draw about drugs...something we hardly knew about at that age. had i looked up something might of clicked upstairs...but i only noticed my mistake at the very end of class, while we were all handing in our posters...and it was then that i felt a little girly and quite foolish. for after one hour of artwork, i see everybodies posters with ciggarettes, bottles of beer, and drugs, with captions that said:

DONT DO DRUGS
DRUGS ARE BAD
DRUGS ARE WRONG
DRUGS ARNT COOL
DONT DO DRUGS
DONT DO DRUGS

and then....there was mine. having gotten the awesome inspiration from a "Janina's Jewlers" commercial on TV, and being able to draw diamonds like it was my job, i had three beautiful blu diamonds on the centre of the page, surrounded by the breathtaking phrase:

A DIAMOND IS FOREVER!

i dont think i won that poster competition. but in my defence, if my poster had been shipped out to a diamonds poster competition...i woulda won hands down!

How eagles learn to fly....and its analogy on life.

Random thought number one:

This just came back to me. Its something really interesting actually so keep reading. Have you ever thought about how an eagle learns to fly? Probably not. But think about it for a second. The nest is a good thousand feet (rough estimate) or so above the surface of the earth, in a really high tree or on the side of a really high cliff. So are those young little dudes just gunna, on instinct, decide one day to throw themselves outta thier safe nest and learn to fly before they hit rock bottom? Nope, thier mother actually does it for them. Heres what goes on:

When thier mother decides she's had enough of thier awful screeches, she starts tearing apart the nest that she so carefully built. Bit by bit it comes apart, until one of the little guys falls out. Now they would be super quick learners if they learned in the few seconds that it takes to smash into the rocks below, and although thier bright birds, thier not that impressive. Halfway down the mother will catch them again. At this point that little guy is like "phewf! mom your crazy, now rebuild that nest so i dont almost die again." But instead of going back to the nest that mom takes her baby up way past the nest, way up into the big blue world above. Then she drops 'em again. And again....and again, until she either fails to catch him and he dies (which doesnt ever happen by the way), or until the little guy figures out how to open his wings and soar....and when that moment comes, well ladies and gents, there is one more King of the Sky. From that moment on there is not a bird as graceful or powerful in the air. That, my friends, is how the eagle learns to master the wind. However, that gets you thinking.....how did the first eagle learn to fly??? Maybe i'll find out...and if i do i'll keep you in touch, but dont get your hopes up.

Sometimes it kinda feels like thats what God is doing to us. We think were in a safe, comfortable place, but theres so much more in store for us that we cant even start to understand. And then the big guy upstairs starts shaking things up a bit, starts ripping our safe little world apart...or at least thats what it seems like sometimes, and things start to go downhill. Then we fall, sometimes hard, but God's always there to pick us back up, and life seems to be going good again, then we fall even harder...and again...and again...and again. Until finally we get the point, open our wings....and, for the first time in our life, we're able to soar!

Then theres those of you reading this (if anyone ever reads these, which is highly doubtfull actually) that think i'm full of shit because you believe there is no God, and that its just a fact of life for things to go downhill. Well if thats how you feel then i pity you....cuz if you ever do decide to jump out on your own and take that leap of faith, you better learn pretty darn quick the first time, cuz who's gunna be there to catch you on the way down???

Lets get down to business!