Our Hero

Our Hero has crawled out of bed.  He is wearing a camel coloured tshirt with an IDAA Palm Springs logo. The bed was king sized with an electric blanket.  He will think about crawling back into the bed many times that morning.  Keeping his options open, he didn’t turn off the electric blanket.
It had been a long time since he carried poison on the off chance he changed his mind about living.
There were exotic women in his life in those days.  Impossibly sexy women whose lithe bodies captured rays of moonlight them hostage for eternity. Fifty such women, some more beautiful than the others and some definitely far wiser.  He remembered them all fondly, like family, like goddesses.  If he could crawl back into his past it would be to those warm places where such angels made nights bearable. That was before he knew the joy of the electric blanket.  He suspected though he might well have sacrificed too much for security.
Our hero hadn’t made it far. Only as far as the toilet. He emptied his bladder reflecting on privilege and the average size of his satisfactory penis.  They’d been discussing racism in the cafe the night before. A mixed group of post grads and other intellectuals. They were dissecting the recent police shooting of a black man with little to go on but the comic book media stories and other farcical renditions of reality.  Our hero had begun to expect that in the not too distant future the news would be given as musicals because it was simply that time  they came back around, especially in the fashion of entertainment.  Then the robbed business man could express his angst and joy at rescue by the junior policeman who might just do his part on point in tutu while the black man  died white faced singing a  monty python song or whatever else the ratings would suggest.
Our hero had wanted to counter the discussion about ‘privilege’ with his own idea that white men and oriental men especially, and even the brown men, simply envied the black man for his outrageously huge cock. Our hero had known cocks. Not necessarily the way the scandalized reader might think but rather from working in an inner city morgue. Even after death there was little doubt that the black man was more often superior.  And that is where the word 'privileged' had come to mind.   How the cafe crowd had pattered on about privilege in terms of wealth and materialism when he’d been thinking about averages.  Everyday our hero reflects on his personal inadequacy. If there had been no globalization, or for that matter, porn, he’d have grown up happy in his hobbit like existence thinking average was okay in a vanilla sort of way.
Now especially after the photographs of Colonel Hadfield he felt small and insignificant, and vulnerable.  What if an even more superior race lurked just outside the galaxy waiting to invade.  He'd not even lost his perfect ex wives to black men.  The truth be known, he'd lost them like others lose their keys or drunks lose their cars. Sometimes he our hero in his cups  couldn't remember who he'd come to the party with.  Still he thought with envy, what if  a superior race of golden men with a better set of jet pods and mansion cribs in worlds with three moons were just waiting for him to let his guard down.  What privilege was it to forever be ready to protect any one of the impossibly beautiful  women that didn't even know he existed today from invading aliens with huge slongs and love potions.  But that was what he lived for.
When he finished pissing in the centre of his own private indoor tiny pool, the product of thousands of years of civil engineering experimental hit or miss, he felt  thankful at least for the steady stream. His was a thoroughly robust waste disposal unit.  All systems go.  He didn't even need Saw Palmetto, yet.
 Our Hero next sat down to meditate, still wearing the camel coloured t shirt but now noticing the red and black plaid flannel pyjamas bottoms.    Cross legged, on the divan (translation:couch) ,  he focused his mind on the centre of the universe, the creator, god of gods, all or nothingness, nada, the supreme, number one, zero, all being, love, peace, Jesus Christ  and countless other matters divine and transcendental.  He always hoped for a lift off, some sort of transcendental fireworks, burning bushes or angelic choirs, speaking in sophisticated foreign tongues, or even nirvana.  He wasn't greedy. He just wanted a tiny bit of paradise, like that flavoured candy that burst in back of one's  mouth after you bit into it  or those fireworks that kept fire working blossoms of light after the first big bang.  Admittedly he wanted multiple orgasms like a girl but he wasn't really sure about big black cocks.
Besides he couldn’t get the jar of Kirkland roasted  cashews out of his mind. He'd seen them on the table just before  he closed to eyes to leave the physical and contemplate the spiritual.  The cashews even displaced thoughts of young girls and black cocks and childhood candies till that was all he was thinking about and opened his eyes.  He truly savoured the first after meditation cashew, chewing slowly and swishing the fragments of ecstasy about his mouth before swallowing.  
Then he lay down on the couch. The bed seemed too far away, despite the promise of the electric blanket. This was  perfectly fine inviting  black leather couch (translation: divan) Pulling the white Hudson's Bay blanket over his head our hero thought maybe lying down was as good a way to meditate as sitting up.
Lying on his side facing away from the light and door,  he thought about old battles, schoolyard bullies by the dozen,  the same ruffians morfed into  judges in courts with sheriffs and Glock sidearms, loud mouthed university cretins became journalists with poisoned pens,  military units and swat teams surrounded him, muggers in foreign cities accosted him. .  He tried to still his mind with holy names but instead thought of the Count of Monte Christo and Bruce Coburn with a rocket launcher.
What would Arnold Schwartzenagger, Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson do, even if they were white guys with only average penis size, given the galactic dimensions of the universe.  He'd just watched Brad Pitt in Troy and didn't want to think about Brad Pitt.  Only yesterday he'd heard physicists postulating a parallel and opposite universe to account for the Einstenian unidimensiality of time.  By that formulation there were still two Brad Pitts and two Angelina Jolies.  In no equation was our hero, the writer going to get the leading lady even if he was Seinfeld or Woody Allen.  Humanism itself had that dirty kleenex scent of masturbation that made the Mystery that much more palatable if only in a Monty Python dead parrot kind of way.
Our hero's  dog found him in a fetal position and licked his cheek.
He got up and let the dog out watching him pee for an eternity on the same long suffering bush that clearly hadn’t considered the dog in it’s seedling choice. of real estate.
Our hero is something of a European hero.   Not at all the Robert Redford hero of America. There was no clear vision.  He’s was a man who was going anywhere.  There was no manifest destiny.  He was Canadian.  He was caught in an Existential angst of history and rewrites with lamentation.  If he'd been truly European his mothers might be the impossibly desirable Angelina Jolie which would  explaining in some weird Frankfurt School way  Alexander the Greats conquest of history. How different things would have been for the young man if Ellen Degenes had been his mother. Or he'd been born in Quebec and his mother had been Celine Dion.  In any of a vast array of possibilities,  he might well have ended up sipping lattes in a Roman suburb with a fat mink of a lover not at all interested in charging elephants on Arabian horses.  Meanwhile Ghengis Khan and his brothers obviously never heard of sex addicts anonymous.
Our hero has made himself a cup of coffee on the gas burner stove and  reflected, in a European style, not quite  Russian Doystoyevski but almost,  on the subject of  Ethical Beans. Even as the black aromatic substance boils he  wonders if Unethical Beans wouldn’t faste more savoury. If he were a business man he'd definitely start an Unfair Trade Unethical Bean company knowing with certainty he'd become rich in this world of cosmic losers
It’s the Christmas season.  Our hero told a friend in the Downtown Eastside drop it shelter that it was That Season again.  The celebration of drunks and bad driving.  He'd commented on how people react to yawns by yawning.  Now daily he found himself thinking of picking up a drink of yuletide misery.  He’d never wanted to drink like a gentleman.  A single glass of spirits had no real appeal.  Our hero had always had  hard drinking Humphrey Bogart  as his hero.  He truly loved his saltry long legged lover and  hard drinking companion Lauren Bacall.  The black and white era of television never captured the Kodac truth of the vomit technicolor on the urine stained porcelain altars hard drinking men and women worshipped.
 In the Yuletide season our hero never  remembered the time the  flying saucer beds and rooms,  guts aching with dry heaves. Instead he thought of white table clothes and black bow tied waiters and  the song “Tiny Bubbles’.
Now our hero is now looking down at his fat white belly thinking of the old time images of success envisioned in  Hugh Heffner mansions, Los Vegas casinos, Metallica stadiums and Willie Nelson smoke filled rooms are today replaced by men and women of wealth, power and significance are taking selfies at the top of Everest or jumping out of planes dressed in elephant suits.  There are no more after hour parties at the lounges.   Winners wake early and flock to the gym. The fall of Wallstreet sounded the death rung on Cocaine.  Sweat lathered bodies make now love like porn stars with the stamina of stallions.  The whole generation of our hero is wasted in old folks homes re encountering their youth in IV’s and better living through chemistry.
No one cares if he the Troudeaus smoke dope or Colorado sold it's Rocky Mountain High to new corporations of pot smoke.  Doctors encouraging mothers in posters to smoke to make smaller babies are lost on the new generation of stoned 'medical marijuana' users   It’s not like anyone in Canada, Jamaica or Colorado or Washington for that matter is  going to be climbing moutnains or jumping out of planes. The baby boomers have long gone to seed and listen unthinkingly to the ranting paranoia of David Suzuki delusional about climate change denial as if anyone ever doubted the rain.  Why not lie on the couch all day?
Finding our hero curled up on the couch again in a fetal position the dog has brought him a squeaky toy in hope of cheering his master up.
The new Pope, Pope Francis,  has declared animals go to heaven.  Our hero is now at a loss.  All his life he’d thought that animals weren’t welcome there.  He didn’t want to go anywhere that didn’t welcome his dog. But now that heaven was a place for more than saints he reflected on changing his ways.  He'd always known he was welcome in hell, especially given the authority with which his ex wives spoke of the institution.  He'd even known many who’d gone there before him.  Having taken to reading the mortuaries in hope of seeing the names of old enemies he'd seen instead the names of long forgotten friends.  But now that animals were welcome in heaven maybe he might have to re consider his life. It was the season for that.  A child was born, they said.  Maybe there was more to life than shit and bones.  He couldn’t go on sniffing asses forever.  What was this place called Heaven anyway.
With that our Hero tossed the squeaky toy for the dog to fetch and reached for the jar of Kirkland cashews.