robotnik2004 | Bob Dhole, Pepe, Big Bird and UFOs

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Jenkin had to bust its little brown hump to do it, but we made it back to The Great White North in time to celebrate the Glorious Fourteenth (of August) with our own kind. Specifically, with my former Golden Words Has-Beens Colin and Colin, known to the world as Pepe and Big Bird, respectively. Big Bird has some kind of George Costanza-like job with the Vancouver Grizzlies, and this thin veneer of corporate respectability makes him a beloved host and sugar daddy to slackers from around the globe. Well, halfway around the globe. Louise was from England, and Alex and Laura-Kate (and us, I guess) were what British Colubrians call UFOs: “Unemployed From Ontario.”

Pepe came over, Derek tracked down his buddy Sean, another Ontarioan expatriate, and we opened my birthday presents: American malt liquor from Derek and Pete and some Canadian [redacted] from the Birdman. So we partied in, around, and on top of Big Bird’s high rise apartment building, listened to space age bachelor pad music, watched Star Wars, and somehow acquiered a little stuffed pig wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket.

The next day, while Big Bird was off to work and Brown Jenkin underwent some reconstructive surgery at Canadian Tire, we toured Vancouver with Sean, who came out here to live the good life a few months ago. Sean had what you might call a “mandatorily minimalist” apartment off of Commercial: after six months, the sum total of furniture he had acquired was: a TV, an air mattress, and a roommate (yet another UFO). The beach was just okay, and a lot of Vancouver was pretty seedy and depressing, but Sean kept us in stitches all day with old stories of Derek’s love life, Lovecraftian spellings of “Dole” a story involving Patrick “Jean-Luc Picard” Stewart that segued into a three-minute guitar solo from “Jesus Is Just Alright,” and pantloads more. Granted, we were an easy audience after hearing and making the same fifteen jokes for three weeks straight, but Sean remains a machine.