By James S. Fell

There are those who would overcomplicate

All food groups that can be eaten and ate

Carbohydrates are bad, and fat is good

I’m afraid that’s wrong. No one ever should…

Consume something that has a mom or face

You must eat whole grains to run a fast race

Insulin and leptin and blood sugar

Do any diets say, “Eat a booger”?

There’s a doctor with a cookie diet

Can that be for real? I would not buy it

Weight loss comes from a magical berry

Brought to Earth by a mystical fairy

I saw it on a television show

A food that fights fat and makes your skin glow

Acai and Quinoa cleanse your pooper

Being hard to pronounce makes them super

Eat what you want and as much as you want

You won’t be fat. You’ll be lean! You’ll be gaunt!

Should we worry about HFCS?

What about BPA? I have a guess

Troglodytes never dreamt of a heaven

Offering pizza 24/7

Is fat genetic or gastronomic?

Environmental? Or subatomic?

Suess wrote, “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish”

All contain mercury; eat as you wish

I saw his ad for a new weight loss pill

He’s a real customer; he’s not a shill

Before and after pictures never stop

With switched around heads using Photoshop

She tried to get on The Biggest Loser

Application rejected. They didn’t choose her

She bought products by Jillian Michaels

A better idea is: ride bicycles

Only 20 minutes, three times a week

Is guaranteed to make you strong and sleek

Buy a Bowflex or get a Nordic Track

It will take up space as your new coat rack

We’ve got calorie-burning underpants

Will they help you lose weight? It’s a slim chance

Don’t go running – it will damage your knees

That’s not how to get in shape, hear our pleas

Just lift weights. It boosts metabolism

This is known as the exercise schism

Up a single tree there are barks and cries

They don’t see the forest of epic size

Weight loss is easy. Here’s the solution

It is all so much mental pollution

You just have to eat less and move around

If it’s so simple, then why have we found

That obesity rates are on the rise

Could it be Weight Loss, Inc. is full of lies?

There aren’t quick fixes or miracle cures

Facts don’t use gimmicks, promotions and lures

There are honest people who want to help

They don’t sell diets that are mostly kelp

Doctors, trainers, counselors and RDs

There are experts who earn their fitness fees

But there is still struggle; one thing rings true

It’s going to take some effort from you

Stay away from the hospital gurney

Prepare yourself for a fitness journey

Ignore the weight loss fads, the frauds and quacks

Find your fitness Zen and push to the max

But not too fast, go slow and go steady

This isn’t a race; advance when ready

When exercise is fun you’ll likely find

That eating healthier is less a grind

You’ll do what Jack LaLanne oft-repeated:

If it’s been processed, you should not eat it

You’ll see food as fuel, rather than pleasure

You’ll feel good and have lower blood pressure

Throw out the scale. That should not be your goal

Focus instead on things that feed your soul

Yoga, Pilates, running and swimming

Skiing, dancing, bicycling and gym-ing

Leave the computer; go out in the sun

Forget burning calories; just have fun

There is one message that I must repeat

When changing the things that you do and eat

To overcome your old lifestyle hurdle

Don’t be a hare, be more of a turtle

Or a tortoise

This article that I unbelievably got paid to write involved salmon, and this way TMI Stupid Story took place after ingesting tuna.

Now we’re back to salmon.

And dogs. There are also dogs in this story. Now before you go thinking I’m some dog hater, know that I love dogs very much. I have breathed in their essence.

What I hate are dumb asses who let their dogs attack me while I’m running. I’d like to pepper spray those dipshit owners.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This stories starts off with fish. Tasty fish.

I have a simple yet yummy way of barbecuing salmon, and my picky eater kids even like it. It’s always a fine balancing act of eating an appropriate amount of dinner on karate nights, which starts at 6:30, so that I can be fuelled but not fudging myself mid-run. You know this story already.

So I ate my fish and I consumed more than I should because it tasted good, then I took the kids to karate and started running in my reflective gear with a blinking armband because it was already dark out.

Then the churning and bubbling of my gastrointestinal regions began and I made damn sure my route stayed close to known bathrooms, but nothing ever came of it. Things sloshed to and fro in my belly as I ran, but I never got that overwhelming need to dash into the World Health Club – where I am a member – to assert my paid-for privilege of defiling their toilets.

But things eventually settled down and it looked like I wasn’t actually going to have another story for my website. But here we are, aren’t we? We are here because of dogs.

I kept running and it got even darker; so dark that I didn’t see the two dogs charging out of the blackness at me until they were about fifteen feet away. I also hadn’t heard their barks and snarls because the tunes were blasting on my iPod; probably Rush.

The one coming straight at me was a pit bull and the one making a flanking maneuver was a bulldog. Two dogs with “bull” in their names decided I was the evening meal. The pit bull was headed straight for my nuts.

Being an aficionado of outdoor running, especially through locations such as the mostly off-leash Nose Hill Park, I have had many run-ins with dogs. Hell, the Chicken Soup for the Soul folks thought my canine misadventures were worth paying me $200 for.

I’ve had my ups and downs and learned how to deal with such situations via trial and error. I remember years ago getting a bit of PTSD from a dog encounter and then being nervous for a few months each time another dog came towards me. I then realized that being nervous made me a target. I do believe they can smell fear or in some other way tell that you are subservient and they can push you around. The more fearful I was, the more I got harassed.

After having this epiphany I completely changed my tack when dealing with aggressive dogs. Many owners must think I’m a jerk, but fuck them. “Off leash” does not mean “out of control.”

Now when I run, I’m the alpha dog. It’s MY path and YOU, quadrupedal annoyance, are the beta and will get the fuck out of my way. Note that I only do this with dogs that I think are coming after me. Ones that seem friendly yet determined to get tied up in my legs I swerve around. Hell, if a dog is really cute and friendly I’ll stop to pet him, especially if it’s a standard poodle.

Back to the bulls. You know that thing about your life flashing before your eyes? Total bullshit, but a lot of stuff did go through my head very quickly and it was all about how this was going to be bad.

I had a vision of this dog latching onto me and not letting go, and me vainly trying to fight and pry him off as his teeth ripped a series of deep and painful gashes through my arms while the other one harried my legs. My peripheral vision had picked up a nearby truck that I imagined smashing the dog’s body against to get him loose. I even had visions of recovering in the hospital after receiving hundreds of stitches. All this flashed through my brain in about two-tenths of a second.

And this next part I’m kind of proud of. I’m proud of not curling up into the fetal position and waiting to die.

When you’re scared shitless there are three things you can do. You’ve heard of the fight or flight response? There is a third option, and that’s “freeze.” I’ve done all three at various times in my life when faced with adversity.

During this encounter, perhaps because not enough time had yet passed for me to become pants-shittingly scared, I decided to fight.

The pit bull was now about six feet away and I went into a fighting crouch. “BACK!” I screamed as loud as I could at the pit bull. “Get back!”

This slowed him just enough for me to land a punch on his nose. Yes, I punched a dog in the nose because I was certain he wanted my balls for dinner. Fuck you if you don’t think this was justified.

It wasn’t a hard punch – not for lack of trying, but because when the dog saw the fist coming he skittered to a stop and I didn’t make nearly as hard a connection as intended. And the pit bull stayed stopped, deciding to just stand there from about four feet away, barking and giving me a menacing look, like he was trying to decipher who the alpha was and if he could take me.

The bulldog had paused for a moment then continued on towards my right leg. I kept my eyes on the pit bull and snapped a kick under the jaw of the bulldog, but he pulled back and I hit air.

All this while tunes were blasting.

Then, with me in mid stand off, the owner came running out of the darkness, yelling loud enough so I could here him through my iPod, “I swear they won’t bite! He’s not a pit bull – he’s a boxer!”

I punched a boxer. How oddly appropriate.

These dogs had scared the shit out of me – not literally. I need to clarify that because this story started off with talk of poo. How could the owner “swear” that they would not bite me after such behavior? Did they have a habit of charging at people and then stopping short at the last moment?

Nevertheless, the dogs were holding firm but not coming any closer. I was still in a crouch, ready to do damage. I wasn’t giving up my testicles without a fight.

The owner had said, “He’s not a pit bull” like he knew that was what I was thinking. The dog sure as hell looked like one. He must get that a lot, because I’ve seen boxers and this dog didn’t resemble one.

Note that I’m no fan of pit bulls. They make me nervous. Again, fuck you if you don’t believe this is justified.

The owner came up and grabbed both dogs by their collars and I yanked the headphones out of my ears. “What the fuck?” I yelled at him; surging with adrenaline and seriously pissed off. “Your dogs scared the shit out me!”

Then he basically started falling down apologizing. It was rather pathetic, actually. I was ready to read this guy the riot act but he was being so overwhelmingly remorseful that I just left, continuing on to finish the last mile back to the dojo.

Within a hundred yards of leaving the death farts started. I don’t believe this was a coincidence.

Remember, everything had settled in my guts before that. Then after the encounter with the dogs the adrenaline and whatever other physiological mechanisms that went berserk during that 30-second encounter turned the partially-digested fish into a methane factory.

They were bad. Fart game bad.

With each landing of a foot on the pavement I blasted out another diabolical death spray from my ass. Just like in the fart game story, even though I was outside and running away from the stench I could still smell it. I wonder how many people in that neighborhood called the gas company that night to complain of a leak.

I don’t consider myself a stupid man. Sure, I make mistakes, but I learn from them. Just as I learned to deal with dogs, I have learned to deal with children.

Not wishing a repeat of the fart game story times two, with pre-pubescent groceries blown all over the inside of the van, we drove home with all four windows open.

I’m amazed my wife didn’t make me sleep on the couch.

I got him when I was twelve and he truly was my best friend. We chose a poodle for hypoallergenic reasons, but it turns out the big guys make awesome pets. I’d have one today if it weren’t for the fact that my wife and kids are allergic to absolutely everything with more than two legs and hair. Yes, even poodles.

The reason for the name is because we did what today is considered by many unconscionable: we bought him from a breeder. He came from a family of show dogs and his doggie birth certificate proclaimed him as “VIP Fleetwood Mac.” I’m not shitting you on the VIP part.

We called him Woodie.

This dog had one helluva personality along with a penchant for crazy shit. He once got into an expensive jar of my mom’s cold cream, managing to twist the lid off somehow, and ate half the contents. Then he started leaving greasy ass splotches all over the carpet everywhere he sat because it was oozing out his pooper. I ended up sacrificing a pair of my underwear to put it on him backwards with his tail sticking out the fly to contain the mess.

My mom, for some bizarre reason, really didn’t want to throw away the rest of the cold cream. It’s not like we were poor, but she decided to salvage the rest of it by scraping off the top dog-slobbered layer and put it back on her vanity. Even though it had made him feel sick, Woodie got into it a second time a few days later and ate the rest and I had to sacrifice another pair of underwear.

I taught him to speak and jump through a hula hoop. He liked playing tug-o-war with his blanket. Every time he went for a car ride he completely lost his mind. He could windsurf. I loved him.

So did my sister’s dog.

When Woodie was three we bought another standard poodle. This one was black and female, and following the trend of retarded show dog names she was called Xanadu because Olivia Newton John was hot back then. We called her Zan. Or Xan. Or something like that. Whatever.

Zan (Xan?) worshipped Woodie. She followed him everywhere like, well, like a little puppy dog. He often saw her as an annoyance because she was so exuberant and he’d had his balls cut off and just wanted to be left the fuck alone for five fucking minutes.

He treated her like a slave sometimes. She would lick his shoulder – her version of petting him – and if she stopped he’d let out a low growl. “Don’t stop,” he would say in dog speak. “More.” And then Zan would go back to licking him.

Woodie died when he was ten. Doggie leukemia or something. James sad. James’ mom sad too.

Zan lived a lot longer. She made it to fourteen and in the intervening seven years (remember that Woodie was three years older than her) Woodie’s ashes were in an urn at my parent’s house.

The ashes thing always kind of creeped me out.

Anyway, Zan eventually died too; tickled to death by her own heart. And my mom got her ashes put in an urn as well and put them next to Woodie’s above the fireplace.

During a night of half-drunken dining at my parent’s place I said I’d had enough of this morbid ashes-on-mantels shit and demanded we spread them. My mom was reluctant but I was a pretty good salesman. I told her I had a good place in mind that they’d both frolicked about at and that I would spread them there and they’d both be free to dance and play happily forevermore in the doggie afterlife.

She said okay, and I fucked it up.

I put the two urns in the trunk of my Acura Integra hatchback and my wife drove us home because I’d been drinking. The next day I headed out of town to a place called Seebe.

Have you ever seen that movie Broke Back Mountain? I’ve watched about 30 seconds of it. It’s nothing homophobic, I’d just rather spend my time on movies that have sharp implements of pain and dismemberment wielded in lethal fashion by hyper-muscled and accented actors or shit getting blow’d up than Jarhead frenching the Joker.

Anyway, there is a scene where the two lovers jump naked from a high cliff into what I can attest is a heart-stoppingly cold river. That’s why it didn’t show them climbing out of the water, because their junk was surely somewhere in the vicinity of their small intestines at that point. I’d heard there was a Seebe cliff-jumping scene in the movie and when I saw it was going to be on TV I DVRed it and fast-forwarded to see which cliff they’d jumped off.

Yes, it was Seebe, and no, they didn’t jump off the biggest one.

They jumped off the biggest cliff on the car-accessible side. It’s about 35 feet high depending on water level (I’ve measured it). To get to the biggest-biggest one, which is roughly fifty feet high, you must swim the colder-than-penguin-shit river and climb up the other side. This is what it looks like. I’m on the left and my friend Stephan (the same Stephan as this LA Times column) is on the right. There’s a damn good reason for those wetsuits.

Shown: Junk protection

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Doggie ashes.

I’d been going to Seebe to jump off the cliffs since I was a teen, and had taken the dogs there a number of times. Woodie would bark his brains out for the first half of the ride, then hoarsely cough out an anaemic imitation of “arf”s and “ruff”s for the rest of the ride. Woodie didn’t hate being in the car. In fact, he loved it too much. His overwhelming joy at traveling faster than any other dog surely ever had run before could not be contained. Bark!

Zan was fairly quiet on the ride up, but always lost her shit when we jumped off the cliffs.

Well, she was okay with the jumping, but definitely not cool with the underwater part. She could watch you walk up to the edge of a big cliff, jump off and swim to shore and she was fine with all of it except when she couldn’t see you. For the entire time anyone she knew well was underwater she’d run back and forth along the edge of the cliff barking mad and thinking Where the fuck did he go? He just fucking disappeared! I must bark about this.

Good times.

The ride up to Seebe to spread Woodie and Zan’s ashes was not such a good time though.

It’s about a 45 minute drive from the edge of the city to Seebe, and at the halfway mark the car in front of me slammed on its brakes for a reason I can’t recall. I slammed mine on too.

There was no accident, but I should tell you something about this car. As I mentioned earlier, it was a hatchback.

You already have an idea where this is going, don’t you?

There was a press-board-type divider thing between the flip-down back seats and the trunk area to “seal it off” from the rest of the car. The clasps on the divider were busted and it always rattled around on the highway so I had taken it off and the trunk area was open to the car.

To avoid an accident I slammed on the brakes and the two ceramic urns smashed into each other. Both of them broke and the car exploded into a cloud of standard poodle ashes. I think I inhaled a little.

I pulled over immediately and popped the trunk. Fortunately, I had a garbage bag full of books that I was going to donate and was able to shovel most of Woodie and Zan into the reallocated bag. Some of their remains wafted out of the car and across the countryside.

I scooped up as much as I could by hand and drove the rest of the way to Seebe with the windows open. I went to the edge of the river and, figuring people didn’t actually want dead animal ashes in their river, spread them around some nearby trees the dogs had pissed on in days past.

When I got back to Calgary I hit the first gas station I could find that had a vacuum and sucked up what was left of my beloved pets.

My mom is going to kill me when she reads this.

I am not a fan of horror movies of any variety. Gory slasher or subtle Satan’s-gonna-eat-your-soul-mindfuck films. They just freak me out too much.

I’d make a shitty Ghostbuster.

Last August I was out for a kayak with my 10-year-old daughter in Pender Harbour. I was in the back providing the power and she was in the front providing little-girl company. She did paddle occasionally.

It was a warm and sunny day and we spoke of things that are important to young females. I had to keep telling her to speak up because she faced away from me. It’s the same drill with my wife; the word I utter with greatest frequency while paddling the two-seater is, “What?”

We saw seals and starfish, eagles and Evinrudes, sailing ships and power-boating dicks. (Really, guys; max harbour speed is 7 knots.)

Then we saw the gateway to Hell.  

As we rounded a corner there it was: a death boat. Sorry, make that a Death Boat. Anchored in the harbour and straight ahead was a decrepit corpse of a ship that I had no doubt was haunted. Its rusted frame was pocked with holes, chunks of rotting wood barely hung from the sides, there was a wide variety of indescribable shit scattered to and fro and I was certain that the only thing that kept it afloat was the wails of the tortured souls trapped inside.

Suddenly I knew that bad things had happened on that boat some time in the past. Many bad things. The memories of unspeakable horrors painted its decaying hull and chipped and flaked away in a desperate cry for an escape from the endless torment that refused to relinquish its hold.

I started to back-paddle.

“Cool!” my daughter said. “Let’s go check that boat out.”

Great. Now I have to act like not a pansy in front of my little girl. Being a dad sure is a tough job sometimes. “Uh, okay. Sure. Why not?” Why not? Why fucking not? Because that boat will murder you to death and rape your essence and your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony for all eternity. That’s why not.

People do stupid things when they don’t want to appear cowardly. I slowly paddled us towards the Death Boat and saw the name hastily painted on the side: “Kwatna.” I didn’t need to Google Kwatna to know that it stands for “drinker of souls.”

"Mmmm... Souls."

As we got closer I could hear the trapped spirits wailing in torment.

“What’s that sound, Daddy?”

Well, sweetie, that’s the sound of us about to die.

“Daddy?”

I couldn’t draw my eyes from our impending doom. I saw some whirring fan thingy at the top of Kwatna. “It’s that fan thing up top there.” Liar. That’s just how they suck you in. That’s not fan noise. That’s tormented soul sound for certain.

“Can we go on that boat, daddy?”

“What? You want to go ON that thing? Are you fucking nuts?”

“Daddy! Language!”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. My bad.” Seriously though, was she fucking nuts? “Uh, no sweetie. We can’t go on that boat.”

“Aw. Why not?”

Because daddy didn’t wear his Depend undergarments today. “Because that’s someone else’s boat.” SomeTHING else’s. “We’d be trespassing.” Onto a portal to the underworld.

Then. “Oh, hey. Look at the time. I’m hungry. Time for lunch. Mommy will be wondering where we are. Time to go. Gotta start paddling back now.” Bye, bye, Death Boat. Please don’t eat us.

We began to paddle around Kwatna and saw that attached to it on the other side was a second and equally soul-destroying Death Boat. Death Boat two-point-oh.

Seriously? A second Death Boat? Why is there as second fucking boat? Why in the name of Allah-Yaweh-Zenu-Oprah is there a second boat?

Fuck you. That's why.

About ten minutes later my daughter said, “You sure are paddling fast, Daddy.”

Can you see it? Is it following us?

“Snuh,” I said.

I will admit that sometimes my imagination runs wild. Maybe that’s why lunch tasted like a worm-eaten corpse.

Washed down with beer.

I left my interview with drumming legend Neil Peart scatter-brained, and with the intervention of iPhone’s autocorrect updated my Facebook status to “Holy duckbills.” I needed a drink.

——————————————————-

On the schoolyard field of battle known as gym class I made the geeks look good. I got picked last for teams – even behind the chess clubber with the colostomy bag – and the Napoleonic gym teacher seemed to hold me personally responsible for it taking him eight years to complete a Phys. Ed. degree.

Appropriately, I worshipped Rush.

After high school I obtained the freshman 15 factored by three, then in an effort to increase my frequency of fornication I lost some weight. Then I built some muscle. Then I quit my job and started writing about fitness. Then I met Neil Peart.

Holy duckbills.

Believing fortune favors the bold procrastinator, three days before the penultimate performance of Rush’s Time Machine Tour in Vancouver, Canada, I contacted Rush management and told them I wanted to interview Peart about his fitness regimen for my Los Angeles Times column. People need to know how he continues to top “World’s Greatest Drummer” lists while qualifying for a senior’s discount.

I didn’t know if Neil even had a fitness regimen. I just took a shot.

And it was a long shot because Neil isn’t known for cozying up to the media. He doesn’t engage in meet and greets and only occasionally gives interviews. Nevertheless, Meghan Symsyk from Rush management got back to me the day before the concert to say the interview was a go. Neil wanted to talk fitness; I was the one who asked. My stomach hurt.

The meeting was scheduled for 4:30 the next day and I took no chances being late, leaving my hometown of Calgary at 2:30am on minimal sleep and powered by diesel pretending to be coffee I picked up my best friend Craig McArthur and we blasted an all-Rush soundtrack on my Toyota minivan’s factory-installed stereo as loud as our middle-aged ears could tolerate.

Craig is a paramedic and deals with much highway carnage from people driving like dumb asses and this is why he doesn’t break the speed limit. It’s also why I wouldn’t let him drive during the 600-mile trip; I wasn’t going to miss the interview.

We stopped once to refuel, re-caffeinate, evacuate bladders and scrub the entomological holocaust off the windshield. Then it was back on the highway at a clip would have had my wife swearing at me from the passenger seat had she been along for the ride. Craig just gritted his teeth and gripped the holy shit handles. We made it to Vancouver in one piece.

“Bold move,” Craig said as I pulled onto East Hastings Street.

“Huh? What?”

“East Van. Canada’s lowest-income postal code. The scenic route.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know. It just looked direct on the map for getting to the hotel.”

“Yeah, right. You just want to see the smack whores.” Then he proceeded to point them out. It was depressing.

We crossed the metaphorical train tracks and barely into the safe zone located our hotel: a Ramada Limited. I interpreted “Limited” as, “Lower your expectations.” Our room had a view of a rundown building with an errant weed growing out the front of it three floors up, a Vietnamese restaurant and a “learn to bartend” school with a sign proclaiming “No alcohol on premises.”

We had four hours to kill. I could have let Craig drive some.

We went out for what I am sure was not “the best lasagna in town” then wandered about the city to work out the kinks of the road. We passed a number of stores that sold everything to do with marijuana except for the substance itself then we saw boobs.

At first we didn’t realize they were boobs. Craig and I were both certain it was a man walking towards us. “He” had a short-sleeved button shirt that was completely open and we saw a barrel chest and man-boobs. The face gave numerous indications of being male as well.

But it didn’t sit right. Underneath the masculine veneer was something oddly female. Butt-ugly-harshed-up female mind you, but still a visage that hinted at lacking a Y chromosome. We couldn’t pull our eyes away as we walked towards her and within ten feet finally realized that this was indeed a woman flapping her jugs to the west-coast wind like a pair of beached dolphins with cerebral palsy.

This would not have been worth reporting except for the fact that she caught us staring at her and gave us both a lascivious, penis-shriveling grin. Some teeth were missing.

“What…” I began.

“…the fucking fuck?” Craig finished.

“Toto,” I said, “I don’t think we’re in Calgary anymore.”

Craig sneered. “I need a drink.”  So did I, but there was no way in hell I was showing up for the interview with beer on my breath, so I watched Craig down a Guinness with envy in a pub that was trying and failing to be Irish. I had tap water.

Enough time killed we returned to the room and I commenced a grooming ritual reminiscent of the first date with my wife 22 years earlier. I thoroughly brushed my teeth, showered, shaved, trimmed errant nose and ear hairs and used a generous helping of lightly-scented antiperspirant.

I grabbed my voice recorder and notebook and turned to leave. “Wish me luck.”

“Don’t screw up,” he said.

It was a ten-minute walk to Roger’s Arena and I texted Meghan to let her know I had arrived at the security gate. A short time later I saw a tall and attractive young blonde woman walking towards me with a smile. She dress stylishly and sported sexy boots. We went through the requisite greeting ritual and Meghan led me down the back halls of the arena. Then she did a face plant.

Meghan smashed into the floor like she’d been pole-axed then bounced back up to her feet and laughed. “How the hell did that happen?” she said.

“Holy shit! Are you okay?” I’m ashamed to admit I had been thinking more about myself. I worried that she’d broken something valuable and we’d have to call an ambulance and there would be no one to take me to my meeting with Neil.

“I’m fine. Weird though, I don’t even know what I tripped over.”

“Yeah.” I scanned for obstacles and saw none. “You just went down.”

She dusted herself off and we resumed walking and passed a paper sign on a door that read, “Unless your name is Neil, Geddy or Alex we have NO free passes left.” I chuckled and Meghan showed me to a spartan waiting room. There were no piles of food, tubs of beer or scantily-clad groupies. Drag.

Meghan told me she read my most recent column where I lamented how movie stars’ publicists act as gatekeepers against their clients being interviewed about their exercise routines because they want the actors known for their ability to rend Leer’s raiment rather than for washboard abs or bulging biceps.

“You read that and I’m still here?”

“I gave you the green light because of that one,” she said. Then, “What are your seats like for tonight?”

“I think they’re pretty good.” I reached into my wallet and pulled the tickets out to show her.

“Yeah, those are good.” A pause. “Do you want front row?”

I began to hyperventilate. Front row? Then panic. I didn’t study journalism. Was this an ethical violation? Is this a bribe to get me to write nice things about Neil? I already worship the guy aaannnndddd I need to write something about evaluating his performance from a physical fitness standpoint and I can do a better job of that from up close, soooo…

“Uh, yeah, front row might be neat.” Neat? Did I really just say that?

She passed over the tickets; I stammered gratitude and looked at them like they were a pair of Bar Refaeli’s underwear then carefully tucked them into my wallet. Meghan got a text and jumped to her feet. “I’ll be back.”

I was alone in the waiting room with the door left open. Every time someone walked by I looked to see if it was Alex or Geddy, but it was all little people. Like me. Fifteen minutes later Meghan returned. “You’re on.”

It was time to meet Neil Peart. I needed to pee.

As she led me down the hall I reminded myself of the need to behave in a professional manner. Besides the fact that Neil wrote the lyrics to “Limelight,” asserting that he “can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend,” the Rush documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage discussed how Peart doesn’t enjoy the hero worship associated with being a rock star.

Keeping my cool and staying focused was critical; I had a job to do. That job did not involve groveling at His feet, overwhelmed by the righteous rays of his utter awesomeness.

I entered Neil’s dressing room. Meghan introduced us to each other then left. I wobbled slightly but didn’t faint.

The man so many drummers refer to as “The Professor” is indeed larger than life. Seriously, he’s a big dude. He extended a massive, meaty drummer hand and I shook it in as un-pansy-like a fashion as I could manage.

He directed me to a leather chair and took a couch across from me, then began talking about the Brazilian-made shoes he uses for drumming. He spent about two minutes of the fifteen we had available discussing these shoes. If I was going to get my story I needed to interrupt him with direct questions, so I worked up my nerve and changed the subject.

And my heart managed to not explode.

We talked about his exercise routine; it’s intense and allows him to continue drumming like Vishnu possessed at 58-years-old. If you want the specifics it’s all in the July 25 issue of the LA Times. Google it.

He cracked the odd joke and I laughed too loud like a pimply-faced teen in the presence of his older sister’s amazingly hot and well-endowed friend (her name was Eva). I only got through half the questions because he seemed to know what I needed and pre-emptively answered my queries. At the 15-minute mark I had my story and Neil had rock star stuff to do. Something about a sound check.

As we wrapped it up he complemented my notebook – a gift from my wife. It has a pretty cover and Neil said it looked nice. Then he pulled his own much smaller notebook out of a breast pocket to show me, explaining that he liked it’s diminutive size because he can carry it with him everywhere and write down whatever comes to mind.

He laid it on the table next to mine and flipped through the pages and I saw the Neil Peart scrawl contained therein. This was the notebook of the man whose lyrics I used as my high school graduation quote. This was the notebook of the man who penned the songs that defined the period of my life when I was certain Ronald Reagan was going to get us all blown to radioactive hellfire and I would die a virgin.

I endeavored to contain my nerdgasm.

I found myself out in the hall again with Meghan, nattering about the great material I got for my column. No longer needing to urinate I thanked Meghan profusely for her help and left the arena. Then unused adrenaline kicked in and I commenced spazzing like a spider monkey on a meth bender. I’d been reading The Oatmeal the day before and the best I could come up with for a Facebook update was “Holy fuckballs,” but autocorrect took over.

Back at the hotel I entered our room where a number of fine brown ales were on ice and my immediate plans of freaking out were temporarily derailed. I grabbed a Newcastle and Craig tossed me an opener. “How’d it go?”

I pulled out the two tickets Meghan gave me and held them up. His eyebrows elevated. “Uh, sweet.”

I blurted out my tale, pausing only for gulps of beer.

Craig and I drank, then we went to a restaurant with large-breasted servers and ate and drank, then we went to the arena and found a good home for the tickets that were not front row.

Having some time to kill we wandered outside the stadium where people openly smoked weed and police openly ignored them. Fans hooted with, “Woo! Rush! Yeah!” and a hollow-eyed and desperate-looking tweaker tried to sell us a microbe-infested t-shirt from the “Moving Pictures” tour.

Then Armageddon struck.

Craig loses things. In 20 years of being his friend I’ve known him to lose numerous sets of keys, at least two wallets and occasionally his mind. Earlier I gave him his front row ticket, worrying if doing so was a wise decision, but I wanted to show I had faith in him to keep track of something so precious for a few short hours. Oops.

Upon reaching the gate Craig realized he misplaced the ticket. He went through all his pockets, but couldn’t find it.

Well, fuck.

“You go,” he said. “I’ll head back to the room and see if I left it there.”

“Screw that. Let’s stay together. We’ll both run back and search.” We dashed all of 50 fifty feet before I held up. “Wait. Before we do that, what is the last thing you remember doing with it?”

“I thought I put it in my wallet.”

“Hand it over.” He did without complaint and I sat down on a concrete bench and began to pull every single thing out of his wallet and meticulously go through it. It wasn’t looking good, but in the very last spot I found the ticket neatly folded in half almost invisibly tucked between a receipt for a butt plug and a membership card for a video store that specializes in transsexual midget porn. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s where I found it. 

“You do realize that I have to punch you.” Then I landed a good one on his shoulder.

“Can I have my ticket back?”

“Bite me.”

We got in. We got t-shirts. We got beer. We got to the front row. Our tickets earned us wrist bands proclaiming we were special. Not short-bus special, but for-real special. We discovered our seats, which we would never sit in, were dead center, equidistant between Alex and Geddy’s microphones. Life was good. Life was special.

I looked behind me to take in the middle-aged Caucasian sausage party that is typical of a modern Rush concert, then the lights went down and my idols took the stage blasting out my favorite song: “The Spirit of Radio.”

We screamed. We sang. We drank beer. We played air guitar. We second-hand toked. We drank more beer. We peed.

And after three short hours it was all over except for the hearing loss.

The next day was Canada Day. Hung over and in no hurry I let Craig do some of the driving so I could furiously scribble notes for the column; my friend helping me compile appropriate Rush lyrics to insert Where’s Waldo-style into the story.

And the story ended up being kind of a big deal. My editors liked it so much they made it a centerpiece feature; it took up three-quarters of the cover of the health section and half of the section’s back page. The web version was promoted on the Rush.com homepage, bloggers wrote favorably about it, Facebook “Likes” numbered in the thousands and my inbox flooded with fan mail.

They’re not my fans though; not really. They’re Neil’s.

James_Fell_Metabolism_Report

This story first appeared in IMPACT Magazine.

According to www.urbandictionary.com, old man strength is “[u]sually acquired by men around the age of forty,” and “[i]t can be used to … prove to the younger crowd that you are not as old as they think you are.” I can pinpoint when my old man strength kicked in for the first time. It was June 6, 2009, during the final stretch of the Calgary Underwear Affair ten-kilometre run in Calgary, Alberta.

I should note that I am not a racer. When I’m running, I don’t like people. It’s just me and my iPod, and I only have a vague idea of how far I run or what my pace is. I’m not GPS-ed, or heart-rate-monitored, or stop-watched or anything. I like being alone and getting lost in the moment, and this is why it took some serious arm-twisting on the part of my sister to convince me to participate in last year’s Underwear Affair, a race to raise research funds for those nasty “below the waist” cancers. She was able to cajole me by asserting that it was mostly a big costume party, not very competitive, and a lot of fun.

Well, 2008 was not a lot of fun. It was a freezing-cold monsoon. Before the race even started my socks and shoes were completely soaked. Still, I gave it a good effort and came in twentieth out of 552 runners with a time of 46:52, which I was pretty sure was a personal best.

The race’s “EXPOsed After Party” lasted only an hour because everyone was so cold they just wolfed down a burger, guzzled a quick beer, and then called it a saturated night.

I hadn’t really planned on doing the race, or any other race, ever again, but a few months ago my sister told me to suck it up and once again raise some money for the cause, and I relented. With the help of generous donors, I raised a moderate amount of funds toward research for things like colorectal, ovarian, cervical, and testicular cancer. There are definitely things below the waist that I’m attached to, so I can see the value in preventing any tumors from taking root down there.

I still had the memory of the monsoon from the year before when I awoke on the morning of June 6 to find snow on the ground. “This race hates me,” I said to myself. At least the entire before and after was going to be inside this year, and I’d only have to freeze for about forty-five minutes or so.

The rest of the day, the weather tried to figure out what it was going to do with itself, but when my sister and I arrived for registration as part of Team Blackcat Bar and Grill (a lovely place where my sister is the manager), the snow had melted, the sun was out, and the temperature was struggling towards high single digits.

While going through registration I noticed that the costumes were even wilder than the year before. I saw Leonidas and his Spartans, a group of tattooed women in corsets, some lady painted purple and dressed up like a bunch of grapes, and a lot of other outfits that were just way too much information. T-shirts and other apparel revealed team names such as the Colon Cowboys, Boxer Bandits, Butt-floss Babes, Nurses in Knickers, and one team name that I don’t think is appropriate for inclusion in this article.

I’ve never been one for costumes, so I just pulled out a pair of silk boxers with hearts on them—a present from a Valentine’s Day long past—over top of my shorts. Even though I wasn’t a regular racer I didn’t want a costume getting in the way of a solid effort, and as gun time neared I made sure I was close to the start line.

There was no gun, just a countdown and a whole lot of elbows. I took off with the leaders at a pace that was far quicker than I was used to and knew I couldn’t sustain. A few people quickly peeled away from the pack and established themselves as the leaders while I struggled to hold my position in what I figured was the top twenty.

Being that I was a rookie racer it took almost a kilometre before I realized I had neglected to start my watch. At first the pace was killing me, but after about ten minutes my breathing started to normalize and I felt myself adapting. I could hear the guy in front of me rasping like he’d pulled an all-nighter with Cheech and Chong, so I decided to try passing him.

I was paranoid about passing people because I didn’t want it to turn into some personal competition that would screw up my pace, but this guy didn’t take offense; by the sounds of things he had his own problems. At my watch’s fourteen-minute mark I saw a man check his watch and asked him what time he had. “Seventeen eleven,” he said.

Cool. Now at least I could do some math and figure out my pace. There weren’t any markers, but there was a halfway turn around that would give me an idea of how I was doing. I was amazed when I saw the turning point and my watch time, plus the three minutes and eleven seconds, equaled only twenty-one minutes. I knew I’d been pushing hard and wondered if I had any hope of keeping it up for the back five.

I grabbed some water to get rid of the sticky-mouth syndrome and almost choked on it, and then a young man in a U of C Medical School team shirt passed me. Over the next few kilometres med student guy and I traded places several times.

Less than two kilometres from the end I was determined to keep my pace and finish in under forty-three minutes, but when I came up to a bridge underpass I ran into a potential problem: a family of Canada geese had laid claim to the path under the bridge and didn’t seem willing to let anyone pass. I knew that these creatures can be as protective of their young as a mama grizzly coming off a meth bender, but I’d be damned if they were going to stop me now. I ran as close to the railing as I could, avoiding the nasty hisses of one of the parents and hoping it wouldn’t beat the crap out me for threatening its brood, then made it clear.

A short time later med school guy pulled up to me and we had a brief, gasping chat. “How much further?” he said.

“Less than two klicks, I think.” I glanced at my watch. “I think we’ll make under forty-three minutes.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“How old are you?” I asked him after another hundred metres, and he informed me that he was twenty-five. We ran another fifty metres. “So,” I said in an effort to spur some competition, “are you going to let a forty-year-old beat you?”

He chuckled, but pushed the pace a little faster and I struggled to keep up. In the last half kilometre he pulled ahead and with only 100 metres to go he had a good thirty-metre lead. I was already on track for blowing away my personal best and having a good finish, but then the old man strength kicked in. I didn’t know I had anything left, but in my desire to beat the young fellow I broke into a sprint for the final stretch and passed the med student, whose name I later learned was Adam, and crossed the finish line in 42:13, taking thirteenth place out of 605 runners.

The next day I hurt from the eyebrows down. I was such a wretched bag of poo that all I could do was sit on the couch, drink beer, and watch the Band of Brothers marathon on History Television while my lovely wife made fun of me.

All in all, I became convinced that the phenomenon known as old man strength does exist.

I also learned that it exacts a heavy toll.

Not all stingrays want to stab you in the heart. Some want to suck on your tits.

Too soon?

June 3, 1995 I convinced a smoking hot medical doctor babe to take the same last name as me. People were there. So was food and booze. I even danced. I even sucked at dancing.

Then me and the doctor babe said goodbye to all the people and got on an airplane. Then we got on big boat. Then the big boat took us places. One of those places was Grand Cayman where a stingray violated my bride.

If we’d been in a bar and I’d had a few, words would have been exchanged.

Our Grand Cayman daytrip involved getting on a smaller boat and heading out to some sandbar called Stingray City. I didn’t see a city. I did see a lot of stingrays though; somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven million of them. The other people on the boat saw them too, and those people started to freak out.

I’ve never heard so much screaming in my life. Not even when I saw a spandex-clad David Lee Roth pelvic thrust a bunch of stoned chicks in 1984.

Anyway, there were stingrays everywhere, and a bunch of people really didn’t want to get off the boat. They were all like, “Oh, I’m fine. I can see the stingrays from here. No, I don’t need a mask and snorkel. I’m going to stay on the boat.”

I was starting to see their point of view.

Then the doctor babe said, “This is awesome! Let’s get in the water.”

I look at my wedding ring, and started to have second thoughts.

I thought about explaining to her the origin of the name stingray, and that it involved the fact that they have harpoon-like implements of stinging attached to their tails.

But it was too late; she was already in the water.

I felt like that guy in that movie, where the woman does that thing, and he has to do it too or he’ll feel like a coward. You know the movie I’m talking about.

So, figuring it was time for me to grow a pair, I jumped in the water too. I could still hear all the screaming underwater. I’m amazed the stingrays could tolerate it. Then I realized what brought them there: squid.

No, we didn’t have to contend with actual live squid too, but the head stingray tourist guy – the guy who convinced people to give him money to take them out to a place where they could be surrounded by fish that would one day kill a man who thought wrestling crocodiles was fun – had a big-assed bucket-o-squid parts that he fed to the stingrays.

Brave tourists could grab handfuls of squid parts and feed them to the stingrays too. I was not one such brave tourist, but guess who was.

My wife liked grabbing handfuls of squid parts and having these creatures come along and vacuum-cleaner them out of her hands. I was having nothing to do with it. I had some crappy plastic disposable “waterproof” camera and relegated myself to photographic duties so I wouldn’t have to feed the stinging death fish.

So that’s what we did. My wife fed the stingrays. I took pictures. Everyone else screamed. Well, not everyone, but there were still a lot of people screaming about the fact that they were surrounding by stingrays. I don’t blame them.

Then my wife went to grab more squid parts, but it was getting to the bottom of the bucket which was a nasty soup of squid-part slime. So she got squid slime all over her hands, and somehow ended up wiping this squid slime on her newly married and bikini-clad chest. It turns out that stingrays like the squid slime just as much as the squid parts, because an overly amorous stingray made his move and latched himself onto her boobs. I think that fish spent more time on foreplay than I do.

I don’t really want to get into any more details, because my wife seemed to be enjoying it.

In case you’re wondering, I was able to put the entire incident behind me. The rest of the honeymoon was pretty good, and even though we did plenty more snorkeling I didn’t need to defend my wife’s honor against any other ichthyoid suitors.

Alcohol makes bad things happen.

Last March I was in Germany for a tradeshow called CeBIT, which is like no North American tradeshow I’ve ever seen. It lasts six days and the days are long. Beer flows like water: good German beer. There are over twenty halls with massive booths and there are extravagant parties every night with booth babes all over the place. At the end of each day my colleagues and I would wander back towards the giant beer hall, making our way through the various tradeshow halls to crash parties, drink free beer and mooch free food. By the time we reached the beer hall we’d be pretty tuned up. Then factor in a couple thigh-sized pints and you are good and blasted.

One of the things we learned from previous years of attending this show is that Hannover, Germany is a pretty wet place in March, and we needed to trudge through a muddy field each night to get back to the house where we were staying. We didn’t want our dress shoes getting mucky, but we didn’t want to look like dorks with suits and running shoes either, so we came up with the perfect western compromise: we took our cowboy boots to Germany. It is a natural fact that just about everyone in my city owns a pair of cowboy boots even if most of us hate Country and Western music. It’s a cultural thing that I’d rather not get in to.

Anyway, the boots look pretty good with a suit, stand up well to the muddy field, and draw a bit of female attention to boot (lame-ass pun intended). I tell you all this because the boots sort of factor into the whole fence jumping debacle that should have killed my boss.

Moving right along, after a couple of mega pints it was closing time and we staggered out of the beer hall and wandered through the now very dark fair grounds and missed the exit. We ended up in the corner faced with a staggering backtrack to get out of the fair when I spotted a utility box next to the six-foot-high fence. The fence was covered with spiky things about a foot long. The spiky things were about every three inches sticking straight up from the top of the fence. The spiky things were supposed to stop stupid people from trying to climb the fence. Most of the time, I think the spiky things do a good job of that.

Most of the time. This was not one such time.

The utility box (Was it a power box? I don’t remember. I was wasted) was about four feet high. I took one look and knew that I could easily hop over the fence because I’m good shape and quite agile. So, this is pretty much verbatim what I said to my colleagues: “I’m not sure if you guys should do this, but I know I can jump that fence no problem.” Then I climbed up on the box, carefully put one hand on the top of the fence (avoiding the spiky things) and easily hopped over, doing a clean landing on the other side. Now if I had a brain, I would have realized that I had just thrown down the gauntlet. Instead of getting the message that my colleagues should walk around, I essentially said I bet you drunken fuckers can’t do that!

So, accepting the challenge to his drunken manhood, my younger colleague went next. He cleared the fence and landed on his feet, but then promptly fell on his expensively suited ass into the mud. In walks random drunk guy. Random drunk guy appears from nowhere and seems to think we’ve got a great thing going here. Random drunk guy goes over the fence too, except the first thing to hit the ground for random drunk guy isn’t his feet, it’s his ass. I bet that hurt the next day. Random drunk guy takes off. Goodbye, random drunk guy. Your part in this tale is over.

Then my boss climbs up. My boss is eight years older than me and not the most athletic of people. Not only that, but he doesn’t have the right idea of how to “vault” or “hop” this fence. He decides to climb over it. Climbing over something covered with spiky things is what we call a bad idea, boys and girls. I run up and grab the bottom of his boot and start to push him back as soon as I see him straddling the fence. “No, no, no!” I protested. “Not that way!”

“Just hold my foot,” came the drunken reply. So I did. Then his boot that was still on the other side slipped on the utility box.

In hindsight, thinking about the way he was positioned, one of them spiky things could easily have gone right through his inner thigh. There is a thing in your inner thigh called a femoral artery. This is something you don’t want spiky things to go through. If they do, well, bad things happen. Things like tremendous blood loss that causes death inside of five minutes, which probably would have put a damper on my drinking and partying for the rest of the tradeshow. I would imagine that the police report would include words like “Death by misadventure.” The general public would just vote him a Darwin Award.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. What did happen was he flailed his leg over, just barely missing the spiky things, and planted his ass squarely in my face. It even left a butt print on my glasses. We both went down into the mud, but at least no one was hurt.

I’ve tried to manage my career by not being a kiss-ass to the boss, but that night I failed miserably.