…salted lithium.

Victor was baptized this week. I think it was his first serious exposure to hypocrisy… he survived, but I think the rest of us are going to Hell.

Other than the Priest and the Holy Spirit, there wasn’t much in the way of representation of the Catholic Church, or even belief in a Holy Trinity, on that stage.

I think my brother came closest. His wife’s family is Filipino, and still holding onto the Catholic traditions from the homeland. They were married in the Catholic church used by her family, and he had to attend three or four months of classes beforehand. I think he still goes to church. He was the one who, during the baptism, kept telling me I shouldn’t be whispering about stuff.

I was told my attendance was mostly symbolic, that all I’d have to do is stand beside my girlfriend and hold Victor occasionally. Those are two things I enjoy doing, so when the Priest called all of us up to the stage I was concentrating on Victor and his recurring gas problem.

Continue reading →

It was an odd week. On Thursday night my girlfriend, son and I were in Ottawa for her last appointment with her psychologist at the Ottawa General Hospital. Getting there was fine, no problem. Getting home meant driving down an exposed country highway, through a blizzard of wet, heavy snow in the pitch dark and with winds gusting up to 70km/h.

The three of us were packed into my girlfriend’s mostly broken Mazda with dim headlights and tires with just enough tread that they’re barely legally considered winter tires.

At times there were no lanes. There was a long line of traffic for the first third of the trip, so with mostly everyone staying in the ‘slow lane’ there was a relatively easy track to follow. But, after that first third, forget it. We were mostly on our own, and the wet, thick snow was mostly frozen at that point.

There was no place to pull off either. We passed six cars that were in the ditch, but even if we wanted to stop the highway’s shoulders were six inches deep in the kind of snow cars don’t come back from.

Continue reading →