If this were a good CheeseburgerBrown diary the intro copy would be in italics and it would say something like, "This is the story of the time I ate six watermellons impregnated with white rum and threw up all over a minor celebrity," or "This is the story of the time I faked an orgasm using a twisty-straw and a small cup of plain yogurt," or "This is the story of the time I visited an obscure pawn shop in the curio district and the withered old Chinaman within sold me a cursed monkey for a handful of cereal box-tops."

But this isn't that kind of diary.

I'm afraid it's much more mundane than that. Read on if you like, but don't say I didn't warn you.


I Am A Wild Party

I have a friend who is under four feet tall. Her name is Ingrid, and I am her daddy. Recently, she has started to squeal "Dada!" with delight whenever she is having a good time. This means that my name is synonymous with fun. Think of that! I've never been so honoured in all my life. (Like Kim Mitchell, I am a wild party.)

If you pick her up and throw her on the bed she giggles and happily screams "Dada!" If you tickle her sides and nuzzle her armpits and poke her belly she releases high-pitched guffaws amid cries of "Dada! Dada!" regardless of who is doing the tickling.

This is all part and parcel of a new phase Ingrid has entered in which she is singularly obsessed with me. My wife's envy is tempered by reminders that much of Ingrid's life to date has been spent obsessing over Mama with Dada being a mere consolation prize when circumstances warranted. Now, it's my turn. When I'm not around Ingrid incessantly demands of anyone who will listen: "Where Dada? Where Dada? Where Dada?"

I admit it freely: I am tickled pink, caught in the spotlight of the attentions of a pretty young girl. It's true.

In the mornings, we snuggle together on the couch and watch Bear in the Big Blue House. We scooch along the couch every few minutes, hiding from the shaft of sunlight that hunts us at the start of each day. "Beah," she tells me, pointing at the TV. "Eye," she tells me next, poking me in the eye.

"I love you, Ingrid," I say.

"Bum," she replies, patting her diaper. The smell hits me a moment later.

"Ah...yes."


Lost Dogs

My father-in-law Old Oak decided that he would like to explore the wide field of wild scrub beyond our backyard, and he offered to take the dogs along with him. "Sure," I said. "The dogs would love a walk."

Old Jag didn't want to go, but our two English Mastiff puppies were very enthusiastic. So enthusiastic, in fact, that when Old Oak bent back the wire fence to let them through they shot off like two furry bullets. They were instantly lost to sight. "Oh, shit," said Old Oak.

I was trying to finish my godforsaken story about visiting Paris, which is the current bane of my typing existence. Every element of my world has been conspiring to strangle any free time I might I have to wrestle with it, so it was with relish that I sat down in front of my TiBook and cracked my knuckles. That's when Old Oak burst through the door. "I vill need your help, ja!" he called. "The dogs are gone!"

I put on my shoes and followed him outside. "Can I have your keys, ja? I'm going to drive around to the other side of the field." I tossed him the keys and headed for the back of the backyard.

I thought to myself: How hard can it be to find two massive, idiotic puppies in a field? I looked across the scrub grasses, short trees planted by the Crown sticking up here and there. I figured I would just have to call their names and watch the bushes for movement...

I was wrong.

As I waded into the thick grass I realised my misapprehension: the uniformity of the grass had let me assume that it was knee-high, when in fact it came up to my armpits. Moreover, the ground was rough and rolling and trees were planted in the lows -- they were not saplings, but thick and unyielding adolescents. I had only gone a few paces but at my eyeline was nothing but leafy bush. I couldn't see beyond a few feet. "Oh, shit," I said.

I walked for a while, calling the dogs, pressing labouriously through low thickets and shrubs. It wasn't long before the close heat began to work on me, turning my skin slick with sweat.

That's when the deer-flies came.

Swatting and swearing, I clamboured out of a thicket and saw an open path before me, a uniform blanket of hand-sized saplings describing a meandering course from one hammock of trees to another. Without thinking too hard about it I made for this "path" in wide bounds, anxious to escape the thickening cloud of deer-flies buzzing around my head.

I didn't consider why such an avenue of saplings might exist until I found myself sinking in peaty muck up to my knees. "Ah," I muttered. "I've found a river."

An ex-river, actually, but that's a fine point when you're stuck in mire. The main discovery was that it was very wet, and entirely unsuitable for walking on.

I extricated myself with some effort.

I slogged over to a mature tree and squirmed up into its lower branches, hoping to get a wider view. Unfortunately, the density of the leafy branches prevented me from seeing much of anything. "Persephone! Kaja!" I called for good measure, but I heard no response.

Coming down from the tree was a less elegant affair. My muddy running shoe slipped on the trunk, and I did a fairly suave flailing fall into the bramble below. I yelled something that was not a dog's name.

The field, which was seemed so unassuming when I'd looked over it from the baclony, was turning out to be quite a savage tract. It was a lamb from the outside, a lion on the inside. On the ground again I was once more reduced to looking for the dogs in the few feet of visibility around me. "Sephie? Kaja?"

I have a set of plastic binoculars from the science store. They have a magnifying glass and a compass, too. I put them up to my eyes and looked at the shrubs around me at 10x magnification. No help there.

I pushed on through a plain of weeds and ivy, my hands above my head. I had the crap scared out of me by a bolting grey hare, which in its confusion at first ran straight at me, momentarily giving me the impression that I was being charged by some kind of rapid mink. "Jesus Murphy Brown!"

After a while I hit Highway 89, drawn in that direction by the sound of barking dog. Not one of ours. A woman was selling strawberries at the side of the road. "Have you seen two dogs?" I asked.

"No, I'm sorry I haven't," said the woman, looking at my mud-spattered clothes. "Feel like some fresh strawberries?"

I started heading back in a wide arc, making a rough circuit of the field. No matter where I was the steeple of the old schoolhouse was visible just above the trees, so it was easy to keep my orientation. Before too long I was back in the yard, dragging my soggy shoes one over the other. I climbed up to the balcony and unfolded my binoculars again.

The wild scrub was reduced to a plane of gentle grasses. A cunning illusion.

With my binoculars I spotted Old Oak driving my purple Nissan back along Gilford Road. I came down to meet him. With him were two over-sized muddy puppies, their tongues lolling out as they fell over one another to greet me. "They vere running around in the road like idiots!" Old Oak cried, shaking his head. "Schtupid dogs, ja."

I scratched my deer-fly bites ruefully. "Next time," I sighed, "use a leash."


All Work And No Beer Makes Homer Something-Something

A smart businessman always has a reserve fund in order to weather the dry periods. A smart businessman spends in strict ratio to his resources, and maintains a spending plan based on conservative projections of future earnings. A smart businessman has a plan.

I am not a smart businessman.

Instead, I am an idiot art-school dropout who barely runs a speck of a corporation because I'm too something or other to hold down a real job. I do this with duct-tape, shoelaces and hope. I do this by crossing my fingers and keeping faith that reality won't intrude too severely. I do this like like a trapeze artist walking a tightrope -- I try not to look down.

Probably the best advice I can give to a prospective entrepeneur is this: do try to avoid buying a house, pouring thousands into improvements, and then flying to Mexico for your brother's wedding all within a three month period. As a corollary: do also endeavour not to do these things right after you buy your wife a home-recording MIDI setup, or right when you're obliged to drop a few thousand dollars on hardware upgrades and repairs. As a final caveat: do do your damnest not to do any of these things quite especially when you're tapped to the limit and have only spotty bookings for work in the coming months.

Why? Because, stupid, you'll end up like me.

Today we bought groceries using the last few pennies available on my credit card. Then we clicked the hyperlink we said we wouldn't, and liquidated a chunk of stock. This is bad for several reasons, not of the least of which being because our investments haven't been doing so hot lately so we barely made off with more money than we'd originally put in. It is also bad because it leaves us with very little stock to liquidate when the next crisis comes.

And it will.

Granted, I have a very big job for the Japanese lined up for the end of the summer. And granted, I do have a fair chunk of change owed to me in outstanding billing. But the reality is that the job for the Japanese is going to require some investment in software and hardware (and possibly personnel) in order to meet their ambitious goals, and most of the money owed to me I already owe to somebody else (the telephone company, the hydroelectric company, the veterinarian, the government). Also, construction continues on the first phase of our fencing project and the workers need to be paid.

The net result is we've had to cut down on luxury items. Ergo: no beer.

(I weep, I weep.)

I stare at my empty calendar and make a lot of phone calls, reminding people that I still exist. I push hard to get pick-up work from a new contact whose chief compositor is rumoured to be about to disappear on paternity leave. I prepare my new business cards and sales brochures, awaiting the money to print them. I gather material for my updated demo reel, bugging clients as politely as I can to cough up promised clips. The cool kids' downtown animation company is dragging their heels, taking a month to make my stuff available. "You can come down anytime and pick up copies of everything except Darn That Dragon," says Alsace, the pretty office manager, when my call is finally returned.

I'm disappointed. Darn That Dragon -- a short film made for the band Rush -- features some very nifty material that I'd hoped to showcase in my updated reel. But Alsace says they won't release a copy to me until after the summer concert season is over and the short has been released to all markets.

(I don't care for Rush, but if you do and you're seeing a Rush show this summer watch for my work -- a giant pink dragon marionette attacks a cardboard city only to be foiled by bobblehead versions of the members of Rush...special visual effects and fire-breathing pyrotechnics by CheeseburgerBrown.)

Alsace also let me know that some of my work picked up a few Rose d'Or awards at this year's Montreux Festival in Switzerland, which is nice to know. The public laurels go to the executive producers, of course, but I'm still grateful for the tip of the hat. I'll note it on my website, and hope that somebody cares.

...Somebody who wants to pay me, preferably.

Now my wife is saying maybe she should get a job. How humiliating is that? She isn't finished her schooling yet (which is on temporary toddler hiatus) so she'd be obliged to pick up some joe job -- you know, like doing an honest day of work for an honest wage. Think of that! She even talked about applying at a nearby milk processing plant. Factory work? Jesus! I think my dick just shrank two sizes just imagining condemning my wife to such drudgery.

No sir, honest work and honest wages are for the birds.

It's my plan to have her make more reasonable money doing multilingual voice work (which pays around a hundred dollars an hour) but first she's got to learn how to use all of her new hardware and software. "The manual for Reason is the size of six Bibles!" she moans. "And we need money now."

"Better start reading," I suggest.

Yes, and then we'll have to buy the materials to sound-proof her studio. Yes, and then we can put some money into promoting her talents, and getting her name out there. And yes, then we'll have to start shuffling the baby around between us so we can each make our professional commitments in the city when we have to...

(Is winning the lottery really so much to ask?)

"Let's just sell porn," I say, holding up the digital camera.

"Shut up," she says. "I'm too fat."


On Fucking

Dealing with the anxiety of temporary poverty is never fun. Everyone has trouble sleeping, and everyone gets cranky. Case in point, it's now one thirty in the moring and I'm down here in my laboratorium typing this instead of lying upstairs next to my wife who's pissed off because I snapped at her when she tried to nag me into bed. "Would you quit pestering me, woman?" I growled.

"You're being a jerk," she observed, and went to bed alone.

She has a sore throat. She's very tired. She resists my efforts to take care of her.

I am desperate for her to get better for several reasons. First of all, I hate to see her feeling under the weather. Secondly, it adds an unpleasant edge to her money-anxiety crankiness. And thirdly, as I've mentioned before when I'm stressed out I really like to have a lot of sex and I'm not meeting with full cooperation as long as she's feeling craptastic.

We did have some explosively fun sex the other night, and she even let me wake her up in the middle of the night for a surprise reprise...but it looks like I'm going to have to wait for the antibiotics to kick in before I get to play again.

Why does my body do this to me?

In moments of elation and depression alike I am cursed with perpetual iron in my pants. It's only when things are so-so okay or so-so the dumps that I can rest in comparative peace. When I win a new contract or score a creative coup, I want to fuck. When the money runs out and doom seems certain or I'm creatively blocked, I want to fuck. I need to fuck.

You know what doesn't help it any? My wife.

After I posted my Ode to LittleStar a short while ago my wife and I enjoyed a period of unprecedented hot sex. She was elated and horny, and so was I. We lay in bed and talked a lot about the nature of autobiographical storytelling, and what facets of truth are chosen to be presented or diminished. We talked about remembering things differently. We talked about what it's like to be married to someone who publishes elements of your personal life on the world wide web.

Part of this discussion surrounded the fact that she gains insights into the way I see things and what events meant to me without a reciprocal exchange of similar stories from her. "But I have stories, too," she said.

"Of course you do," I agreed. "From a certain point of view, however, I have some access to those stories because you wear your feelings closer to the surface than I do. In a way, you're always telling your stories. Mine are saved up for one big purge."

"That's not what I'm talking about," she countered. "I mean that I can get into a space where I think I really know you, and then read one of your stories and end up surprised. I can take my knowledge of you for granted, and then have that knowledge humbled by reading a story. But it doesn't go the other way."

"Do you think I take my knowledge of you for granted?"

"Sometimes," she nodded.

"So, tell me a story," I invited. "Surprise me."

And so she did. She described to me some events from her youth in Kitchener-Waterloo, in which a fifteen year old LittleStar and her girlfriends had enjoyed some adventures in promiscuity that in equal measure shocked and titillated me.

It was true: I'd never thought of her that way before.

And now she's asleep upstairs nursing her sore throat, and I'm down here with the narration of those stories rattling around inside my head word for explicit word. Phrases and images roil, unbidden. My breath catches. I am not nursing a sore throat, but something else instead.

(A more sensible man would be surfing for porn now, instead of typing into the Scooposphere. Ah, me.)

I smoked a cigarette tonight. I'm not supposed to smoke cigarettes, but I did anyway. Who can blame me? I spent the day chasing bitches in the bush, and later, just bush. I'd kill for a pint.


Coming Soon...ish

Both my current stories are in the bung-hole. One sucks, and one's just stuck. I wish I had all day and all night to write (except that when it goes well, I get horny). I've just about thrown in the towel on A Cheeseburger in Paris and I'll be surprised if I let it see the light of day. My current problem is that it is fattening up to the point of not quite fitting into a single posting (damn your posting limit, Scoop!), yet not nearly dramatic enough to break into two parts.

The second story, Spectra of Sin, has already been broken into two parts but the second part hasn't come very far. Too much happened in the real sequence of events to squeeze in, and I'm having trouble figuring out what to cut. I do think it is a strong story, though, so I'm willing to wrestle with it for a while longer yet.

After that I'm going to see if I can tackle my time in Halifax, at art college, when I defriended a jazzman and fell in love with a genuine cowgirl. Part of the delay on this story comes from the fact that I'd like to simulaneously post a web-compressed version of a documentary I made while I was there (entitled Way of the Jazzman) and I haven't gotten around to digging the master out of my archives yet. I thought it might be neat to have some multimedia support, so that you could catch a glimpse of each of the players in the story. Or might that compromise the versions of them I describe in the text? I don't know. What do you think?

There have also been several requests for a fuller story about the diminutive Sicilian oil-painter for whom I apprenticed when I was a teenager. I haven't yet come up with decent framing idea yet, but I'm thinking about it.


In Conclusion

I'm poor and horny and tired and awake and I have deer-fly bites on my arms and neck. I saw Shrek 2 and it was okay. One of my cats is dead, which still sort of upsets me.

Also: the television programmes they air in the middle of the night are sub-par. Feh!

On the other hand, my new gigabit Ethernet network is up and I love it. On the other hand, my daughter is precious and my wife is hot. On the other hand, I still don't have to go to work on Monday. On the other hand, things are grand.

It's a cheeseburger's life, I tell ya.