The Exile vs. Lunch

I learned a valuable lesson last week: Never eat a foot-long meatball marinara sub while writing an article on tax reform. Just don't do it.

See, people in my chosen profession are, at the end of the day, more or less human.

We sleep, we laugh, we play, we love, we facebook, we hate and, on a few rare occasions, we eat.

At the office, lunch typically involves going out in our ones and twos to Timmy's or Subway. Occasionally, someone is foolish enough to say the regrettable words "I'm going to Timmy's, anyone want anything?" and eventually returns laden with goodies destined for others.

Last time, however, a rare group outing to Subway saw me return to the office with a foot-long meatball marinara sub, with a generous helping of cheese and mayo. I'd had that combination before, but only half that size.

The possible effects of such a massive portion increase should have given me pause, but no! I cared not! Hunger ruled my reason as I scoffed it all down, savouring each and every one of the bites that took me one inch closer to my eventual cholesterol overloaded-death. It was glorious. It was just what I needed on a rainy Friday afternoon in a windowless bunker.

And then, just after I'd wiped the last stain of marinara sauce from my satisfied, grinning lips, my brain died.

She just died. All higher activity ceased. My intelligence trotted off to the big mensa club in the sky, leaving behind a five-pound lump of grey matter more useful as a particularly messy paperweight than as a tool of cogitation. It was just too much meat and mayo and cheese for me. It's like when you have a slice of turkey and just fall asleep, only I didn't have a couch to crash on.

What I had was a three-hour recording of the previous night's all-party legislative forum on tax reform, along with detailed notes complete with time stamps. Any other day, this would be the work of a couple of hours but in my present state of mind, barely capable of counting to ten, the likes of HST cuts, tax breaks, heating rebates and vencap incentives were a trifle troubling.

Even the social aspect of the forum was rough. The nine-member all-party committee was hoping for opinions on all the tax proposals, but it really turned into them explaining the flat-tax option while person after person came up and told them what a bad idea it was. That's a lot of people, and a lot of names, and some of the speakers were in french, which I had a translating device for, but had to rely on my notes for actual quotes.

That and I only knew three of the nine MLAs who spoke, so I had to rely on a number system to mark who was speaking when. And, for context, I had to summarize all the tax proposals all these people were actually talking about, which meant translating into plain English the inscrutable gibberish those nerds at the Finance Department use in their discussion papers.

Either that, or government tax documents are handed down by god himself, who's still pissed that the human race can still communicate with each other after the whole tower of babel thing, and is now trying to finish the job.

I'm exaggerating, of course. It wasn't that hard, and I'm organized enough that that kind of story, while a chore, is not daunting. End of the day, though, the history major had to struggle through a complex financial story while his brain was out to lunch, as it were. I hammered out a first draft somehow, but resolved to tweak it over the weekend in time for Monday's paper.

So now in the office we refer to the whole thing as the Meatball Sub Incident. Of course, when it finally dawned on the sports guy and the editor who was on duty that I was dead to the world, the howling laughter started. The tip-off may have been my uncharacteristic silence and, when I was about to stagger home, my attempt to give my editor a story update that ended in me screwing my eyes up in concentration for, like, a minute while I tried to remember what other story I had been working on that day.

As has been common of late, I happened to get stories that spilled over into the weekend, so I went into the office at 7 am on Sunday (hey, the earlier I get in, the earlier I get to leave) after spending Saturday flitting in and out of a consultation session for French education reform (another crowd pleaser around here).

And when, of course, the subject of lunch came up, the editor's laughter started slow, sort of like a satisfied giggle. Then it gradually grew in intensity like an avalanche of mirth, until her belly laughs guffawed across the office, setting off the sports guy, the production department and myself. By the end of it, we were all in tears and I had resolved never, ever to go to Subway again.

Stupid meatballs.

The Third World

On Wednesday, I drove to the third world.

It was about a half-hour drive down the 117, in a town called Baie-Ste.-Anne, named for Acadia's favourite saint. The cloudy sky couldn't take away from the scenery, a mix of forest, rivers and coastline dotted occasionally with boats of all kinds. Seemed nice, until I got to the place, anyway.

See, about a month ago, a man from here froze to death after the provincial energy utility disconnected his hydro. On Wednesday, I went to his house. Here's the story, have a gander before reading on:

http://miramichileader.canadaeast.com/front/article/284138

This happened before I started, and it's not my beat, but the boss figured we ought to do something since it's in out coverage area, so I wrote it as a feature, not news.

I tried to bring across what a godsdamned hellhole that was. And it wasn't even some random shack on the outskirts of town, either. The post office was right across the road, next to the bloody RCMP detachment, of all things. It was maybe a three, four room house, but every room was filthy. You could barely see the floor for the scraps of clothing and blankets, and tons of propane tanks. There's a picture attached to the story, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You had to have been there, in the dark, with the stench of shit and kerosene in your nostrils to really get a sense for what a place that was.

The brother, Bert, changed his story a couple of times, and I notice when doing archive searches of other papers that some of what's printed there is different from what he told me. Either they fucked up, or he was unreliable. That's not uncommon. He was obviously traumatized by what happened and people in that situation, their heads can be a little screwy. This is unrelated, but I've found that sometimes the worst sources are eyewitnesses.

But that doesn't change the fact that this shouldn't have happened. And it's just a glimpse of what some parts of this province are like. Out in Ontario, we make jokes about how poor the Maritimes are, and I guess I knew what I would find. But knowing is one thing, and seeing it is another.

And I'm going to be here for years. I like to think that's the worst I'll see, but this is definitely a rougher place than what I'm used to. I'm settling in fine, but having the chance to see that for myself and have to write about it in a way that brings the reader right in there...makes me feel like a real reporter. Odd that I should feel so good about something so terrible, but there it is.

This is such a strange place.

And so it begins

I finally got around to starting that blog that was mentioned in the sacred texts of the same unspecified religion that foretold my coming. The world is now one step closer to the apocalypse.

Anyone who is mentally disturbed enough to actually enjoy my weekly "News from Exile" e-mails - which will keep on coming anyway - will expect the same type of pseudo-humour here. Occasionally, I'll dip into politics or personal philosophical musings, but mostly it'll be updates on my adventures, with a lot of descriptions of Miramichi, that world-renowned hive of human activity.

Sometimes, it will seem like dispatches from another planet, and not only because of the extraterrestrial origin that is one of the more popular explanations for my mannerisms and mode of speech (I tell my friends from Ontario that I'm from South Africa for the same reason I tell the Miramichiers I'm from Charlottetown: It cuts down on the confusion).

This will mainly be because for the first time, I don't really have anyone to hang out with. Aside from my fellow reporters at work, most of whom I get along with great, I just don't have anyone my age to talk to, aside from the guy across from me who likes Final Fantasy, doesn't drink and smokes like a bloody chimney.

So I have a lot more time for introspection and I like to think it's made me more observant. At the very least, it's allowed me to keep pitching stories at work such that I rarely have to ask the boss for newstips. As well, most everyone I know in this country lives in Ontario, and while my exile is necessary and a true godsend (hey, compared to having to go back to Africa...), it won't last forever. When I go back to Ontario, I hope to return to contacts and friendships that won't have dulled. It will make it easier to find a couch to crash on while I hunt for a new place.

That's all that's in my head right now. More to come as more odd things happen to me.