He’s in the room me and my brothers used to shared. He’s putting together the bed that he made from scratch, the one he built in his workshop, and I walk into the room. “Dad, you’re… you’re alive.” This is what I usually stammer out before he laughes, smiles and says “Well, I certainly feel alive!” Then the brothers are there, and mom shows up, and we’re all in the room I grew up in, laughing like we used to, laughing like nothing has happened.

Then I wake up.

I’ve had this dream a number of times now. It’s not a pleasant dream, it’s not a dream where I wake up feeling better about life. It feels like my father was taken away from our family again. Without Dad, every holiday feels emptier, every birthday feels like something is missing, and every Father’s day is a reminder not everyone still has their father in their lives. I’ve got no one to give a gift or a manly handshake to, so instead the only way I know how to honour my father is to talk about him.

My father is from IOCO, Port Moody, on the lower mainland. IOCO’s a weird little place, as it wasn’t really a municipality as it was an old oil refinery. It stands for Imperial Oil Company, and there was a little hamlet that was close by that took on the same name. My Dad was one of six children, and has an identical twin brother, my uncle Lee (If you were ever curious as to why I was named Sandy Lee Charlton, well, there’s your answer).

My father, like any intelligent person, despised working. He worked for CP Rail, and worked as a train conductor. When presented with the opportunity to work more on the road and make a lot of money, or stay in the Golden train yard closer to home, he took the job closer to home. To say that he didn’t particularly enjoy working at his job didn’t mean he wasn’t a hard worker. He instead, with my mom, invested in property around town and eventually outside of town. He was always painting or plumbing or repairing a number of houses around Golden.

He also had a massive workshop that he was constantly tinkering around in. The beds me and my brothers slept in were built in his workshop. There was a number of wooden toys we had that my father built, and not little tiny toys, massive toys planes we could ride on.  He was also a skilled electrician. It wasn’t unusual for a neighbor or a friend to drop off a television or a VCR, stating my Dad could have it because it no longer worked. Usually after an hour or two of doing repairs, we’d have another television in the house. At one point, there was fourteen televisions, six VCRs, and no cable. So there was fourteen televisions all playing the CBC at any given moment.

My father was also involved in the community quite a bit, going to meetings, volunteering to lend a hand. He also helped do a number of peoples taxes, insisting he do it for free. I learned after his death that he actually won a civic award for doing so. He was an amateur actor, and had a great deal of influence on both me and my brother (we both swept best actor for every year in high school. There’s ten years of Charlton on the trophies at Golden Secondary).

Out of all the memories of my father, from building stuff in the woodshop to getting on stage with him in a play, my fondest memories were of getting fire wood for the stove, and having to go to the dentist in Canmore. Getting fire wood was a pretty big ritual, it involved getting up at five, throwing together a quick lunch, then searching the backwoods for fallen trees you could cut up. Our home was heated by the fore stove, so it was necessary to gather wood for winter. The biggest was definitely Canmore. I had a weird mouth growing up, and it required a lot of hardware to straighten out my teeth. The only person qualitfied to work on me was in Canmore, so it required a two hour drive to and from the dentist. So that meant me and Dad were stuck in the car, chatting for four hours once a month. We got to know each other pretty well.

My Dad with me and Kelly. Sorry for the potato quality

If you’re old man is still alive, and you’re on good terms, take him out for lunch and give him a hug. My father isn’t around fortunately, but he left a legacy of helping his community, being a loving husband, and raising three kickass sons. He was a better man than most, and he’ll be sorely missed.

To my father, Laurence B. Charlton. I miss you every day and I love you tons.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. The upside to him not being around is I don’t have to buy him a gift today. That means I get to save like five bucks!

p.s.s. My father would have found that funny.

 

I’m angry right now. Actually, angry doesn’t describe how I’m feeling. Furious. Outraged. I’m so endlessly pissed off right now, I had to go put on my monkey hat to calm myself down.

The Monkey telling me to relax

I’m angry about potatoes. Or rather, what someone else said about potatoes. He does not eat potatoes. Said he stayed away from anything white, like rice, flour, and yes, potatoes. Potatoes. The goddamn staple of a healthy diet. It’s a massive stone in the food pyramid.

Now, there’s a lot of diet garbage out there people love to fall for. There’s the Paleo, or caveman diet, which excludes all foods existing after the Neolithic era, like dairy, grains, and legumes. This an insane diet, as I’m pretty sure most cave people didn’t live longer than the ripe old age of thirty. There’s the Maple Syrup diet, made popular by Beyoncé. It involves drinking nothing but sugar water with cayenne pepper, as well as giving up all of a persons sensibility. There’s the No Carb diet, which is a weird one because carbohydrates are the basic fuel source that allows a body to keep being a body. And on the more extreme ends of things, you could get on board with the Parasite diet, where you make friends with a tapeworm who helps you finish those extra helpings you so desperately crave.

I love to cook, and I usually try to make everyone with dietary restrictions happy. You’re a vegan? No problem! I can whip up a bunch of tasty dishes with only vegetables, fruits, legumes, grains and nuts. Allergic to fish? We’ll do lamb, lamb is delicious, we’ll make a mint sauce to go with it. You’re sensitive to gluten? Well, you’re probably full of shit and for whatever reason decided that the damn staff of life is too good for you, but hey, usually that means an extra helping of vegetables for you and I won’t be passing you the garlic bread. You don’t want any fries? Sure, that’s okay, I can whip up some mashed potatoes for you if you… You mean it’s not the fried part? You… can’t have potatoes? Why? Because they’re fattening. Right. Gotcha. I’m just going to go ahead and pull up the Wikipedia page on potatoes… Ah, yes, right here. Pretty much no fat in a potato. Closer to zero than any substantial fat. But you’re still not going to eat them.

Anybody who walks into my house and refuses a helping of potatoes can leave. I mean that. You better have a damn good excuse for not wanting to take a serving of potatoes. The asshole who shows up to a dinner party and refuses potatoes is the same person who’s going to take four servings of cake because they’re hungry. Or they’ll need two steaks. Or you’ll find them in the bathroom eating all the Tums and squeezing a bottle of toothpaste down their throats. People who don’t eat potatoes shouldn’t be invited to dinner parties in the first place.

Potatoes are boring? You’re right, they’re incredibly boring. They’re boring because they’re so ridiculously packed with vitamins, minerals, and energy they don’t have room left over for taste. You can survive for weeks on potatoes alone. In the novel and the major motion picture ‘The Martian’, by Andy Weir, when the protagonist gets abandoned on Mars, you know what he grows to stay alive? He grows potatoes. He didn’t plant a field of Kale, he didn’t decide to seed a bunch of Goji berry bushes, the protagonist got straight down to business and grew potatoes.

And if he had some flour, he could have made perogies

They are such an important food item that when Ireland ran into a shortage during the Great famine, people started dying. The people who weren’t dying drew up a modest proposal to eat babies. You know that party asshole who passed on the potatoes and instead ate all the macaroni salad? If you have a baby around, you keep that baby close, or otherwise Mr. TooGoodForPotatoes will get the impression that you keep the kid around as a second course.

The United Nations gave the entire year to 2008, calling it the ‘Year of the Potato’. Broccoli didn’t get a year dedicated to it. Anyone remember the year of corn? I didn’t, because there wasn’t one. You know what’s a terrible crop? Corn is. It’s nutritionally devoid of anything useful, and it makes lousy whisky. In fact, there’s only one hard choice when it comes to potatoes. Do I eat the potato now, or do I wait for it to ferment and drink it later?

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. And when people talk about being gluten intolerant. It’s bread! The goddamn staff of life!

p.s.s. Yes, the last line referring to fermenting potatoes is from Archer.

 

 

 

More people today are connected to each other through a massive cellular network. Not only can you theoretically call billions of different people, you can access the internet through most providers. A human being alive today has more information at their disposal than the greatest scientists had thirty years ago. This leap will have such an impact on future generation it’s almost impossible to fathom. In your pocket, you have access to this wealth of information.

Not only do you have access, but you have a powerful machine, capable of creating written words, pictures, movies, art, music, and designs. What you have at your fingertips is a more powerful platform than what was available to people on their desktop personal computers fifteen years ago. The phone you have is more powerful than my sweet gaming rig was back in 2001. With all this raw computational capacity available to you on your person, people are now able to catalogue and transmit information with friends, family, and co-workers.

I’ll be honest, I hate having a cell phone on me.

You think with all the bells and whistles, Mr. Charlton would be on top of that like a fat kid on cake, but alas, I’ve never been a big fan of being constantly tethered to the network. It’s not that I think that people ‘don’t talk anymore’, because people have always had their faces pressed into newspapers and books the second the printing press was invented. I don’t think that people are getting dumber, although I used to hold that opinion. People are generally getting smarter across the world, and our unlimited access to information is making that possible.

I hate it because I no longer have privacy. I’m no longer out of reach. If someone wants to get a hold of me, whether it’s through Facebook, twitter, text message, email or, heaven forbid, an actual phone call, then I’m available. At all times. People get upset if my phone was off, or I leave it at home. “Where the hell were you, Mr. Charlton, Mars? Did you try to take a swim in the depths of the MAriana Trench? Did you decide to toss all of your belongings into a fire and join a bunch of Luddites out in the middle of nowhere?” These are the kind of questions I face should I choose to go without the stupid thing for a day.

Trust me, I relish every part of every day that I’m without my cellphone. It means that I might get lost. It means I have to physically go to a place to see if it’s open. I won’t know what’s on the menu at a restaurant before I get there. For the rare day that I get to do this, a sense of uncertainty, of chaos somes back into my life. It’s been a while since I haven’t had a cell phone.

I was a late adopter to the cell phone craze, I didn’t get one until 2007, I think. The phone I use now, a Samsung Galaxy SIII, was purchased back in 2012, which makes the phone only four years old. For some people, this is some sort of cardinal sin, not uppgarding once every year or two. I keep holding off, keep pushing it back because I honestly don’t know what I would do with a new phone.

“You’ll be able to take better pictures.” – I don’t take a bunch of photographs or movies with the one I currently have.

“You’ll be able to play cooler games!” – I can do that at home, on the couch, and sip wine as I’m doing it.

“You’ll need a new phone eventually, they keep upgrading the operating system for phones, and soon, you’ll have a telephone that is sluggish and decrepid.” – You know what? That ‘s actually already true. My phone is slower than a two-legged tortoise high on muscle relaxants.

Which brings me to my final point. I hate phones because the people who build them have created a brilliant market for themselves through planned obsolescence, which is fancy talk for “We’re going to bog down your phone eventually to the point where it’s no longer usuable, so that we can pressure you into buying a new phone.”

I can upgrade my computer, why the hell can’t I upgrade my phone? Why can’t I add more RAM, or change the camera, or choose the opertating system? Look at the IPhone, you can’t even open them up without a ton of work and voiding your warrenty.

That’s my beef. You can keep a car running for decades, you can upgrade your home computer if it’s a PC, and you could fix your old tube televisions. If you can’t modify or tinker with something you’ve purchased, then you don’t really own it.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. I’m building into something bigger, this is just me ranting late at night.

 

I recently purchased a bunch of games for the Xbox recently, and I’ve having a ball playing them. I made the switch over to PC gaming a while ago, but I’m in possession of an Xbox console right now and sometimes sitting on the couch with a glass of wine beats the dusty office where my computer sits. One of the games I’m playing has me especially hooked. It’s a Role Playing Game set in the future with space as it’s backdrop. You’re the captain of a spy vessel, working as a clandestine operative for the galaxies highest authority. You uncover a plot by a rogue spy, who has aligned themselves with an evil artificial intelligence. Not only are you tasked with eliminating the threat, there’s a multitude of worlds to explore and missions from various people to complete. To top it off, there’s a steamy sex scene, that certainly caused headlines. Nine years ago.

I’m talking about the game Mass Effect, and yes, it’s a great game that’s aged well. Yes, I’ve sunk over twenty hours into it over the last month and a half. Yes, it totally feature a sex scene between your character and another character. And yes, it was a big deal years ago, earning both critical acclaim and journalistic scorn for showing naked bodies. Games at the time still carried more of the stigma of ‘Children’s toys’, but the people who believe that, well, they’re not in high of numbers as they used to be.

Now, you might be asking yourself why is Mr. Charlton talking about a game that’s almost a decade old. And that would be very astute of you. The reason I’m bringing it up here is that I’ve got nowhere else to bring it up. Over the last decade, I’ve been barraged by new media in the form of books, movies, games, music, you name it. Because of the burst of creativity from all sectors, I haven’t been able to keep up. That leaves me in a position where I’m no longer in the pop culture loop.

Pop culture is the culture that’s popular right now. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to have a meaning (in fact it rarely does), it needs to be hot. Without using Google, can you name some of the hit songs of 1996? What were the hot new games coming out? What movie was breaking the box office? What books were on the bestsellers list? There’s a couple of things that come to mind, but nothing concrete. When I think about 1996, I have a hard time remembering how old I was.

Getting back to my game, Mass Effect still holds up. It has an intriguing story, the graphics still look pretty good, the gameplay is solid. It was a good game then, and it’s a good game now. But because I’ve chosen to play the game at a much later date, the only thing that’s missing is the water cooler talk. I can’t bring this up with any of my friends or co-workers, people on the internet haven’t posted about it in several years. The only thing the game is lacking now is the ability to dissect it with other people. It’d be like trying to talk about a baseball game that happened five years ago. It may have been a great game, but it certainly isn’t fresh in the minds of the masses. That’s the downside.

Mr. Charlton tend to consume his media years later, when it’s lukewarm and you can tell if it’s aged well, and that’s the plus side. Something that was hot and tasty yesterday might still be great after a couple seconds in the microwave. Other media might be great when it’s piping hot and fresh, but when you take a look or listen a number of years later, you might come to the conclusion that it was made for consumption then, and now it’s stale and tasteless.

I usually have a lot to say, and I usually have a lot to say about what’s trending at the moment. Most of my posts deal with what’s going on at the moment, because it’s easy to write about something when opinions are everywhere. Consuming media years after it’s been created makes it tough to talk about what I’m reading or what I’m consuming. So should I get back in the game and start keeping up with a Game of Thrones? Or should I put my Netflix account to good use and re-watch Escape from New York?

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Let’s be honest people, everyone knows I have Escape from New York on DVD and watch it at least once a month.