The Helloman.

What scares you?

What causes your eyes to widen, your throat to constrict, your heart to pound? What makes you run, legs pumping, lungs straining, out of the darkness and into the sanctuary of light? What paralyzes you in bed, freezes you in place, pulls the covers over your head, puts your hand over your mouth to stifle the screams?

Let me tell you a story. Two stories, actually.

My last post related how I saw something in the kitchen of our neighbors’ historic house. A woman who was there and then wasn’t. The ghost who dwells in our neighbors’ bathroom and likes the door to be kept open.

The truth is, there is something — a presence — in our house as well. The actual building is dated 1960 on our property plans, but the land itself, the ground the house was built on, is ancient. And something—someone—is still attached to the place. Has never left. Is still seeking the portal to wherever it is the dead are supposed to go.

Viking Woman says it’s a man. During the course of our marriage, she has consistently demonstrated a degree of psychic ability that I have come to trust. For instance, she ALWAYS know when I’ve been naughty. So I have come to trust her ability to “see” things that my dulled Planet Man senses can neither perceive nor comprehend.

Except, this time I do know there is something else in the house with us. I’m often here by myself while Viking Woman works out of town and, in the quiet and the stillness I have, on more than one occasion, caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Each time I have snapped my head around to see who is there, a reaction as instinctive as pulling your hand back from a hot stove. And each time there has been nothing there. No one. The room empty but for me. The house empty but for me.

In the dead of the night there comes noises. The groans and knocks of a 59-year-old house settling as the temperature drops in the graveyard hours? Or the footsteps of someone doomed to forever walk the floors of this structure we call home?

You can see into our kitchen from the lounge. Viking Woman has often supervised my dishwashing efforts from her vantage point in front of the TV. Earlier this week, I entered the kitchen from the other end of the house and was in the process of closing the blinds over the sink when she called out to me.

“Leave those alone and come in here.”

“Why? There isn’t anything on TV I want to watch.”

“Just come here.”

There was an urgency in her tone that made me drop my hand away from the handle and dutifully pull up the easy chair beside her.

“Are you OK?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“He was in the kitchen.”

“Who was?”

“The man.”

“You mean the ghost?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where in the kitchen?” I asked.

“Standing right behind you.”

Here is the second story:

The abovementioned neighbors have a two-year-old daughter. All two-year-olds are naturally precocious and so we merely shrug and smile when wee Bella goes into our fridge, hauls out a raw egg and a bottle of tomato sauce and announces she is hungry. Or when she wanders through the house, examining our wonders and treasures.

I was sitting in the lounge when she came down the hall after a solo exploration of  the bedrooms.

“Hello, Bella,” I said. “Are you having fun?”

She responded to my question but because toddlers have their own language, and this one is filtered through a New Zealand accent to boot, I’m not exactly sure what she said. But I do know it was something about the “helloman.”

I thought that was cute. That she was saying “Hello, man” to me as a form of greeting because she’s not yet sure of my name. But when I mentioned our conversation to Bella’s mother, she frowned in puzzlement.

“Bella knows your name,” she said and, to prove it, gathered up her daughter, pointed to me, and said, “Bella, who is that?”

“John,” she said.

So she does knows me. She knows my name. Which means she wasn’t talking about me when she came down the hall.

So who was she talking about?

What manner of creature had she encountered in the cool depths of our house?

Who is the Helloman?

I can’t go with you standing there dead.

Based on my personal experiences, here is a short list of things which may or may not exist: a vampire who looks like Robert Pattinson/Stephen Moyer; UFOs; sasquatchs; magic; a winning lottery ticket; a sympathetic wife; an honest politician; any chance I may have of becoming a porn star; my continuing career in journalism.

Ghosts used to be on that list. Not any more.

Viking Woman and I live in an historic section of Napier. The area’s first post office is across the street. Nearby, you can still see the stables where the stagecoach made a rest stop to change horses. The land our 1960s-era house sits on once belonged to a missionary named William Colenso. This enterprising fellow did a lot of great things in his lifetime but is probably best remembered for doing his maid. Colenso is buried in a nearby pioneer cemetery. Not surprisingly, there is no mention of the maid on his tombstone.

The house that backs onto our property was once the church hall. It is now occupied by a lovely young couple who live there with their be-dimpled daughter and a cat that we made the mistake of feeding once and which now pretty much demands food every time it deigns to grace us with its presence.

Their house is also occupied by a ghost.

According to The Wife, the apparition is that of a woman who, for the most part, remains in their bathroom and is perfectly content to share her space with the living, providing the door is left open.

Although, The Wife tells us, there was that one time she decided to sleep in her daughter’s room to comfort the child, only to have the ghost poke and prod her, as if to say, “Get back to your own room.”

The Wife is quite calm and rational as she relates this story as if she is relating something that happens all the time, to everyone she knows.

On one recent weekend, while the family was out of town, they left a key with Viking Woman’s niece, Jenn, so she could attend to their eating machine of a cat. Their house is built into the shoulder of the hill that rises to the north of our property, meaning it overlooks our yard. Viking Woman, in the course of puttering around in her veggie garden, happened to look up at the couple’s bedroom window in passing. Catching a glimpse of someone standing there and watching her, she assumed Jenn had gone next door to feed the feline.

And then Viking Woman rounded our garage to find Jenn sunning on our lawn.

I don’t know about you, but my knees feel funny when I hear stories like that. My skin starts to pucker and those funny little hairs on the back of my neck do this strange kind of rustling dance.

In other words, I don’t like stories like that.

Except, now I have my own story.

Last night, the couple invited the three of us over for dinner. The Diet Coke flowed and I suddenly felt the urge to empty my bladder. I stood up and started to dig our house keys out of my pocket.

Viking Woman: “Where are you going?”

Me: “Home to, um, pee.”

The Wife: “Just use our toilet.”

Me: “At the risk of sounding silly, I really don’t want to meet anyone in there.”

The Wife: “You mean the ghost? Look, she’s harmless. She may grab your ass, but you might like that.”

I don’t know about you, but the thought of standing there, equipment in hand, while icy fingers from the grave goose me is pretty much guaranteed to have all my sphincters flap open in a simultaneous purge.

So I went home and then, like a good guest, came back. There was, after all, ice cream for dessert.

I sat down on the couch, turned to speak to Viking Woman and that’s when I saw her. The ghost. The appartition. The woman in the nightgown.

Just for a second, mind you, and just a brief glimpse. But I definitely saw someone walking across the kitchen from my left to right. By the time my eyes focused and my brain processed the fact that all the living people in the house were in the lounge with me, the, um, spirit had moved to the point where Viking Woman now blocked my view.

I sat up straight. I craned to look past my wife. Into an empty kitchen.

So that’s why there are no ghosts on the above list. That’s why I no longer empty the kitchen peelings after dark, because our compost container sits in a back corner of our yard, pretty much directly under the neighbors’ bathroom window. The bathroom where the lady in the nightclothes awaits.

Does any of this explain why there are so many flies around here? Are they somehow sensing something dead in the neighborhood? No, wait. Don’t answer that.

I really don’t want to know.

Publish or Die! Part 6

At what point, during the process of sharpening your pencil, do you end up with nothing more than a pile of well-intentioned shavings?

I’m asking myself that question these days as I reach the quarter pole in my final polish/edit of Brown Girls before I publish the new and improved version.

The novel, set in the Cook Islands and starring Jack Nolan, was first published in 2004 by PublishAmerica, back in the bad old days of POD publishing, before Lulu somehow made such endeavors glorious and worthwhile.

The book was originally comprised of some 212,000 words. Before submitting it to PA, I’d given it several reads in an effort to weed out typos and replace missing words and ensure that suspense and thrills were actually present in what I’d classified as a suspense thriller.

Viking Woman did the same, as did former Langley Times workmate Brenda Anderson. PublishAmerica had an editor do a cursory scan, but that resulted in little more than “jandal”s being changed to “sandals,” a misguided correction I then had to go back in and fix.

And out into the cold, cruel world went my first child. That it drew much acclaim and kind reviews was a bonus, a very much appreciated bonus.

After I negotiated the return of the publishing rights from PA, I turned for help to my new friend, Jeff Buick, a Calgary-based writer working in the same genre. Jeff initially made several suggestions, before he sat on my manuscript for some 10 months and then left me dangling, e-mails unanswered. (Yes, that was somewhat rude and thoughtless and unkind of him, but I will let that go now and assume the God of Karma will deal with Mr. Buick at some future date.)

At Jeff’s urging, I changed Jack Nolan from a Canadian to an American, the thought process being that citizens of the great and wonderful US of A won’t read a book about people who aren’t exactly like themselves. Jeff also advised me to limit the Cook Islands Maori words that I’d used because, he explained, Americans tend not to tolerate any language but their own, The Kite Runner be damned.

Another suggestion I can attribute to Mr. Buick (who has, at last glance, NOT won the Pulitzer Prize for literature) was to make the novel shorter. Because, you guessed it, American readers = no patience for lengthy tomes.

In the end, I compromised: Jack is now an American and I snipped some 20,000 words, but I did keep the native language. The one constant from my 2004 foray into publishing was that readers felt transported to Rarotonga when they read Brown Girls and I was deathly afraid to lose that magic via the Delete tab.

Viking Woman feels the same way. She has not read the new version (the penultimate editing was kindly done by California-based writer/Facebook friend Alice Grey: fishbonesandmilk.typepad.com) but her chief concern is that I have somehow sliced the soul out of my book all in the name of streamlining.

I value Viking Woman’s opinion. Partially because I have no choice, since our contract contains that whole “love, honor, obey” clause, but mainly because she was right there with me in Rarotonga when I experienced the events and met the people that inspired the book in the first place. One of the major female characters is based on my wife and whole slabs of this character’s dialogue are reproduced verbatim, and so you can understand her concern.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, some of the early editing of Brown Girls version 2.0 was also based on advice from Lisa Rector, who once upon a time wrote a column for my Sports section in the Langley Times, before marrying New York-based literary agent Donald Maass, moving to the Big Apple and starting her own manuscript editing business, which you can find at thirddraftnyc.com. And, yes, that was a free plug. And, yes, Lisa, you do owe me. And tell your parents I say hey.)

All of which brings me back to my opening metaphor. At what point in the editing process do you stop following other people’s advice and suggestions and personal opinions? I could quite possibly ask 100 people to give me editing advice and quite possibly receive 100 more comments.

All fine and good, and some of them might even be helpful, but none of them would be based on the heart and soul and inspiration that stirred me initially to sit down and spend nine months (the first time around) of my life banging out this book.

The truth of the matter is that, at this point, I have stopped listening to other people (except, of course, for those faithful readers who have spent five years demanding a sequel — soon, I promise). I will finish this final polish and then send it out for the world to judge its merits (stand by for more information on that process.)

Sometime in the future, I hope Jeff Buick actually reads the new version of Brown Girls. This time, however, he’s going to have to pay for it.

Full-contact bar hopping? Not with my ass.

There is no need to visit a zoo to see the animals.

Viking Woman discovered that fact on the weekend when, in the company of her niece, Jenn, and a comely neighbor I’ll call Miss Libby, she dropped in on the platoon of bars that stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the West Quay in Ahuriri, one of Napier’s historic communities.

The idea was to have a girls’ night out, to have fun, a few drinks, a few laughs, maybe dance with a stranger, before summoning me to come pick them up, good non-drinking, well-trained husband that I am.

It was Jenn’s first experience with the Kiwi nightlife and she was not impressed. She was, in fact, horrified-slash-appalled by the hand-to-ass contact she witnessed. Comely Miss Libby was the subject of much of that manhandling and, though she confided later to Jenn that she appreciated neither the touchy nor the feely, she seemed to accept it as part of the price you pay for venturing into the wilds of a New Zealand bar.

Jenn, a good ole Canadian gal from the Prairies, assured me later she would not have tolerated a hands-on approach from any larrikan looking to cop a feel as she passed through the crowd. I had the distinct feeling she would have ripped off any offending hoon’s arm and slapped him across the head with the wet end. He’d spend the rest of his life learning to tie his shoes with his teeth.

While Viking Woman was subjected to her own share of groping, it was a verbal exchange that left her rolling her eyes over the uncouthness of those who inhabit Planet Man.

I’m going to call the fellow in question Mr. BJ (for reasons that will soon become painfully obvious). He is, according to the friends in his company that night, a former All Blacks player who now owns some kind of garage door company. Apparently his years of training as a professional rugby player taught him some interesting moves.

This is a (roughly) verbatim exchange of his conversation with Viking Woman, after he managed to break through a scrum of male admirers clustered around the hot babe my wife..

Mr. BJ: “Do you do blowjobs?”

Viking Woman: “Yes I do. In fact, I give very good ones, to the right guy. But you’ll never find out.”

Mr. BJ: “Do you swallow when you suck cock?”

Viking Woman: “Pardon me?”

Mr. BJ: “Who’s boning you?”

Viking Woman: “Well, certainly not you.”

Jenn, ever the good wingman, stepped in at this point and Mr. BJ, clearly deflated at being unable to put his ball through these particular uprights, staggered off to impress other patrons of the female persuasion with tales of his sporting prowess.

It was a close encounter of the rude kind and we all laughed about it later but I was still left shaking my head at how this fellow had opted to be so direct. Did he really think that approach was going to impress a lady, or was it the alcohol that made him cut to the chase?

I was also fascinated about how he played the “former All-Blacks” card. Maybe I should try that myself. After all, claiming to be the fifth Baldwin brother has proved to be a spectacular failure, as has purporting to be the father of the Jonas brothers. The problem with that latter ploy is that no one over 12 has heard of the Jonas brothers, and no one over eight cares about them.

There are too many reasons to list here why Mr. BJ did not make much of an impression on Viking Woman. But part of the problem could lie in the fact that he was a rugby player. Rugby is a religion in New Zealand. Women like it because the players wear snug jerseys and snugger shorts. Men like it because, well, let’s face it, it’s another reason to drink.

But we’re Canadians, with an affinity for North American sports. We find rugby all a bit — how can I put this politely? — gay silly. Unless five opposition players are using your body for a couch, you are allowed to get right back up and keep running. And you need only touch the ball with a fingernail in what passes for the end zone to be credited with a try. I mean, come on, how hard can that be?

Now, if Mr. BJ had been, say, a hockey player, there might have been a different ending to his quest. He was never going to score, of course, but he might have been asked for an autograph.

The only thing being stroked would be his ego but he might have enjoyed that. I’m guessing it’s the only large thing Mr. BJ possesses.

My arm is sore from patting myself on the back.

Dear Faithful Readers (hi Mom!):

My travel story about my recent sojourn to Tahiti has now been printed in the Calgary Herald.

Here is the link:

http://www.calgaryherald.com/Wild+times+TAHITI/1413071/story.html

This is me being my own PR machine. This is me hoping someone will read the story, slap their forehead and say, “This guy is a brilliant writer! Hire him immediately!” Or, even better: “Give this guy a winning lottery ticket!”

Maybe I’m simply wasting a blog posting on a chilly autumn morning in New Zealand. But, hey, if I don’t toot my own horn, no one else is going to. And, yes, that does sound rude. And, no, I don’t care.

Horses hate me. The feeling’s mutual.

ABBA fans will rejoice in knowing their favorite group is big with horses. OK, maybe not with the actual horses, but certainly with their riders.

How else to explain the predominance of the Swedish super group’s music (albeit strictly in an instrumental format) in the performance soundtracks compiled by particpants in the Dressage — Level 4 Musical Freestyle competition at the Kelt Capital Horse of the Year ‘09 show in Hastings, New Zealand.

The show, trumpeted as the third largest of its kind in the world, pumps a lot of money into the Hawke’s Bay region over its six-day run. It also pumps a lot of odor into the air of Hawke’s Bay. And by odor I mean horses. And by horses I mean horse poop.

Don’t get wrong, I have nothing against horses. Well, other than the fact I detest the beasts.

I’ve felt that way ever since one kicked me when I was in high school. Ever since I tried to date a girl who owned a horse and who informed me the animal would always come first in her heart, no matter how cute I looked putting entire apples in my mouth or swatting away flies with my ears.

Horses are huge, they eat way too much and, let’s face it, other than providing the occasional ride, what the hell use are they? They are never going to fetch your slippers or roll over and play dead or rid the house of pesky rodents or purr on your lap when you’ve had a bad day. And don’t even get me started on that whole house-training thing.

But I’m here at the show anyway because I’m doing a favor for a friend. This friend was supposed to fill in for the regular event announcer while he takes a lunch break, but three broken ribs means she isn’t moving anywhere fast. So being unemployed free this afternoon, I have accepted an invitation to volunteer my time for the sake of all things equine.

I was supposed to be the backup’s backup on the mic but, as it turns out, my friend did quite well on her own, the bashed ribs not at all affecting her ability to read and talk at the same time. Which meant I spent five hours doing little more than pushing a CD deck’s “on” button whenever the riders gave the little poncy wave that indicated they were ready to start their routine. Oh, and I also had to wait a two-beat before I actually pressed the “on” button, so the riders had time to gather up the reins again.

I know — it does take a lot of practice to get your timing just right, to not stumble and start on one, or fumble the gap out to three. Wouldn’t want to begin Mamma Mia before the rider was ready, would we? Who knows what revenge would have been exacted for such a sin.

Why, they just might encourage their horse to put a hoof up my arse. Nah, been there, done that, still got the internal bleeding.

I know what — they’d force me to come back on Saturday and Sunday to do this all over again. But I’m thinking that would never work as a deterrent. Because I’ve already agreed to do it.

I’m either a glutton for punishment or there’s just something about the smell of wet hay in the morning I can’t seem to resist .

If you need me, I’ll be in the announcer’s booth, humming Dancing Queen around a mouthful of apple.

He who was once immortal, is no more.

I was.

I was once . . .

Younger.

Thinner.

Optimistic.

Fearless.

Employed.

High school athletics had been ignored for years before I was hired as the sports editor of the Langley Times in 1989. When the sports section is a one-man show, that one man gets to decide what fills the limited space alloted for each edition.

I made my own choices. I had no ties to community soccer or Junior A hockey or the old boys rugby union. But I did attend Langley Secondary. My parents live near Brookswood Secondary. I could relate to high school athletes if only because I was never one myself. Unless, of course, you count my football career with the Saints, which lasted for one play and approximately 30 seconds. While I never did score the winning touchdown, I did score one of the team’s large lockers in the study hall, designated to store all that bulky equipment that would never be used.

At the paper, I quickly became a champion of high school sports, to the point where the occasional action shot actually made it onto Page 1. Front page, baby! Full process color! Top of the world, ma!

There were times, I admit, when I sat in the stands in another gymnasium, watching another game, working another hour I would never be paid for, missing another meal at home, when I wondered if I’d still be hanging around high schools when I was 65. Would I segue from covering the children of my fellow LSS graduates to covering their grandchildren?

Now, thanks to the global recession, I no longer need worry about that. That’s because I can no longer find work as a journalist.

Granted, some of that is my own doing. I chose to leave The Times at the beginning of the century to embark on something we once called the Damn the Pension World Tour.

In the early, heady, fun days, Viking Woman and I used that expression in jest . We’re no longer laughing.

Newspapers are dying. Falling to their knees and keeling over in front of me. Those left on the field of combat are staggering and wounded, bleeding jobs from every orifice. Because no one is advertising. Because no one wants to pay for news they can read for free on the Internet. Because no one under 25 can read words that are spelled out using all their letters.

I live in a one-newspaper town where the newspaper isn’t hiring. Twenty years of interviews and stories and page layouts and headlines and movie reviews and late nights and coffee stains on my ties and fingerprints worn off on keyboards and tears shed on deadlines, and now I’m . . . what? A dinosaur. A fossil. A dusty artifact of the 20th century.

Reduced to looking for Help Wanted signs at Starbucks and United Video and the supermarket.

The time I once spent polishing meaningful prose—prose I was paid handsomely to produce— is now taken up by this blog. Effort that earns me zero cash and, if I’m lucky, maybe a couple dozen unique visits. On a good day.

There was a point—quite recently, actually—where I could at least take some small comfort in the fact I’d enjoyed a good run. Twenty years: Millions of words. Thousands of bylines. Hundreds of photos. Some people never get that. Some people work their entire lives and go into the ground having left no mark at all in the world to mark their existence.

But my name will live forever , bound into the books in which back issues of the Langley Times are archived. Books with red covers. With hard covers. Books to be kept forever.

And then comes word that, during a recent shift, someone hired for the day to clean out junk inadvertently placed several of those red books in a Dumpster.

Now my words, my thoughts, my opinions reside in a landfill, buried deep in a rubbish tip. The pages pulped and mashed. The ink streaked. The photos blurred. My bylines smeared.

I was once  . . .

Immortal.

I am no more.

When I smell wine, I hear Latin. I do not, however, make grass angels.

Maybe it was because the package of paper umbrellas was gathering dust in the pantry. Or because the bottle of pineapple juice in the fridge was within mere months of its best-by date. Or perhaps the half-empty rum bottle really did need to be finished off so it could be recycled for the sake of our greenie souls.

Upon reflection, however, the most likely reason we found ourselves at Park Estate Winery for the second time this year was because Diane Park had informed us in January that when her current supply of coconut cream liqueur was sold and gone, it would not be replaced.

According to Viking Woman’s logic, that news somehow equated to pina coladas that would never be consumed. And, apparently, that would never do.

Returning to Park Estate Winery (2087 Pakowhai Road, Napier, New Zealand; park-estate.co.nz) also allowed us to show JB a bit more of the countryside. And by countryside, I mean the inside of the winery’s cellar door.

It also allowed Viking Woman to re-sample the 2008 Sauvignon Blanc. In January, she’d agreed with Diane’s assessment  that it needed to age a bit longer, if only to reduce the acidic finish. On this March weekend, Viking Woman was pleased to pronounce that the Sauv Blanc was coming along quite nicely, thank you very much.

Also tasted on this early fall afternoon, with Viking Woman’s comments:

2006 Riesling: “Very fruity.” “Very nice.”

2007 Gamay Noir: “Quite a spicy finish.”

2007 Chardonnay (25 percent oaked): “Very soft. Melon-y on the nose, with a vanilla finish.”

2006 Merlot Cabernet: “Very earthy, but soft.”

Boysenberry fruit wine: “It’s very nice. A very soft finish.”

As the lone non-drinker in the crowd, I could only nod and take notes and photos. I have no concept of taste when it comes to wine, but I do rather enjoy sticking my nose into a glass. I appear to have an astute sniffer, having already proved adept at telling the difference between Pepsi and Coke strictly by their aroma and, more impressively, doing the same with various Starbucks blends.

Smell-wise, I prefer reds. They conjure images of fruit drooping from trees in the hot, still summer air, backed by a hint of freshly-turned earth. Whites, on the other hand, all remind me of the sacramental wine I served up as a Catholic altar boy in the ’60s — sounding out the Latin mass phonetically and praying to Baby Jesus not to fall asleep in front of the entire congregation.

We thanked Diane Park for her insights and comments, purchased the coconut cream liqueur (only eight left now!) and drove home. Once there, I downloaded the images from my camera and pondered the alchemy involved in turning a simple grape into a liquid whose taste and smell can invoke so many different impressions.

And the ladies?

They mixed up pina coladas, drank themselves silly, and made grass angels on the back lawn.

*Sigh*

The award for most ignored CV goes to . . .

I’m reading Michele A’Court’s column in the March 7 Your Weekend magazine (included in the Dominion Post) when I notice the credit line at the bottom: “Michele A’Court is an award-winning comedian and writer.”

Well, of course she bloody is. I mean, who in the journalism business isn’t an award winner?

Because I’m chronically unemployed between journalism jobs, I’ve been using the Internet to peruse a lot of newspaper lately. And, oh look, every one of them has won an award.

Exactly what kind of award would that be, you might well ask. Ah, now there’s the rub.

Judging by some of the content on those websites, the prize could very well be for Most Typos in One Story, or Worst Headline Ever in the History of the English Language, or even Poorest Use of Judgement When it Comes to Choosing Photos.

I mean, come on, how many frickin’ awards can there be out there? If your farm reporter won the largest turnip at the country fair, does that count? If your editorial staff won the three-legged race at Staff Fun Day, does that count?

When I worked for the — wait for it — award-winning Langley Times, I frequently submitted my sports stories to various industry competitions. But it was a lot of work digging back through the files to fish out tear sheets and then filling out the accompanying forms. That was time better spent on minor details, such as, oh I don’t know, getting the darn paper to the printer before deadline.

After awhile, when my deathless prose consistently failed to impress any of the judges, I simply stopped wasting perfectly good time and let others more keen for glory vie for the accolades.

Actually, the majority of the editorial awards the Times won during my 11-year career at the paper were thanks to the photography skills of John Gordon (johngordonsphotography.com). John is brilliant, and I’m not just saying that because I wrote the foreword to his book, Langley: Familiar Places, Familiar Scenes, and earned a wad of cash for my efforts (but, alas, no awards).

With that talent came a degree of frustration, a trait not uncommon with those who “paint with light.” Many was the game where I paced the sidelines as time wound down, wondering if I was going to have art to go with my story. Just as I was about to grab my own camera, John would wander along, snap off a few frames, and be off to his next assignment. In the morning, I’d find another perfect shot on my desk and wonder why I ever doubted the man.

It became somewhat of a given that, come awards season, the Times would nail something and if that honor went once more to our photographer, then so be it. At least it meant we all worked for an award-winning newspaper.

Actually, during my stint in Langley, I did have one fleeting brush with fame. It also involved a photographer, although this time it was Rob Newell (robnewellphotography.ca), one of the weekend shooters. While John Gordon won the majority of his accolades based on work he did for Page 1 and the hard news section, Rob actually scored an award for a sports photo.

As the sports editor, I made the decision on whether or not a photo was included in my section. I ran Rob’s shot and he subsequently won the award.

I don’t know what those rocket scientists who feted Michele A’Court’s attempts at writing a humor column might think but, personally, I’m taking at least partial responsibility for Rob’s official recognition.

Which would explain why my CV describes me as “an award-assisting journalist.”

I mean, that’s got to attract someone’s attention when it comes to filling a position in a newsroom, right?

And it will. I’m sure of it.

Any day now.

An old dog learns a new trick. About the wonders of wee.

Bonita has gone home. Back to Canada and snow. And insulated houses and central heating.

Which leaves only three of us now to rub shoulders in this tiny house. It also means the chances of me getting into the bathroom in the morning before my bladder explodes have greatly improved. And, believe me, having your bladder explode can ruin your whole day. Not to mention the bedclothes and my favorite pair of Krispy Kreme boxer shorts.

Of course, being equipped with Planet Man plumbing, I do have the option of stepping outside before leakage can occur, although that does raise the probability of my neighbours spurting coffee out of their noses.

It was during one such late-summer saunter into the backyard — the dew cold on my bare feet, the birds stunned into silence — that my mind wandered to thoughts of our friend’s dog Baxter.

The friend is currently nursing an injury and so Viking Woman, JB and I have been taking Baxter for his twice-daily constitutionals. Actually, Viking Woman and JB have been doing the walks. I only tagged along once, after the mixture of a warm Sunday afternoon and a pitcher of pina coladas meant someone who could actually feel sensation in their legs should be included in the group jaunt. You know, in case Baxter forgot the way home.

Baxter is a male dog. Baxter’s bladder is bigger than my head. It has to be, because he lifted his leg every five paces and continued to do so for the next 40 minutes.

Why do male dogs feel the urge to pee on everything? I could probably find the answer using Wikipedia, but I’m just going to use my imagination here and wing it.

I’m guessing Baxter’s urine tagging is similar to humans leaving Post-It notes:

“Hellooooo, ladies. The Bax is in the house.”

“My territory extends from here to . . . here . . . to here . . . to . . .”

“Hmm, I can’t eat this or screw this, so  . . .”

“This is my bush. And this is my power pole. And this is my tree. And this is my patch of grass. And this is my baby stroller. And this is my car. Although I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that.”

My point is that Baxter would sniff out something he found interesting, anything, really, that happened to catch his attention, and proceed to wee all over it. Flagging it. Claiming it.

So I’m standing there in dawn’s chilly embrace, barely conscious, recycling last night’s Diet Coke in a steaming arc of triumph, and this notion crosses my sleep-fuzzed mind: What if I were to do the same as Baxter? What if I were to mark my possessions, my territory, so everyone would know to back away. To steer clear. To bugger off.

This is how my brain rolls before I’ve soaked it in caffeine. But — weirdly enough — it made sense.

Before Bonita left, I was the lone resident of Planet Man in the house, forced to live in close quarters with three women, only one of whom I could divorce. They were in my kitchen, they were touching my things, they were moving my things. With impunity, without a second thought, simply because they felt this feminine urge to “do something.”

But what if — some dark, quiet night — I were to spread my, um, scent around? To leave some Eau du Planet Man on whatever I wanted to claim as my own, be it territory or object. Be it kitchen or remote control.

My very next thought was this: Why restrict such behavior to the house?

Surely there are other things I can claim as my own by the simple act of hosing them down. For instance, one of my neighbours has a neatly-chopped pile of firewood and the New Zealand winter is closer than we’d like to think. Oh, and I did spot that 50-inch plasma TV the other day at a downtown electronics store.

All it would take is one quick squirt and they’d be mine.

Messy? Just a little. Smelly? What’s your point?

Easy? Oh, yeah.

I already know what you’re thinking: “John, that is sheer brilliance.”

Brilliance? Face it, we’re pretty much full of it here on Planet Man.