slingin lingo in boston

Well, put the official fork in the official promotional tour.

With mayoral and city council elections pending in New York and Boston, all planned appearances were quashed, as not one candidate apparently had the stones to be associated publicly with someone who farts on Wall Street and spends an unhealthy amount of his time medidating on the importance and signficance of poop.

Even the Boston dadaist candidate, Swiffer Wetjet, (who says he is walking, not running, in this race) is shunning slinginlingo, claiming the poop posts are too coherent and laced with meaning.

It all came to a head when I showed up for a taping of the Late Show with David Letterman last week and upon arriving -- after hours of conjuring up and honing a couple of surely roof-crumblingly funny anecdotes -- finding out I had merely won a ticket to appear in the audience. I'd been bumped for some no name Matt Damon and some glorified zoo keeper named Jack Hanna.

More on that some another time.

So I was a somewhat broken man here in Boston, shattered by all the love lost. Also, as my inner currency exchanger has proved defective, love was not the only of life´s necessity I was losing -- my bank balance greeted me soberly, like a wet shower every morning.

With this in mind, I just kind of wandered around downtown my first day, following this little red and brick line in the sidewalk, trying my darnedest to keep my hands out of my back pocket. It turns out I was following the Freedom Trail, which outlines some of the major events and places that begat the American Revolution.

After taking a tour and reading up on the many placards, I have to say, the patriots in Boston in the 1760s were some breed of shit disturbers. I mean, no doubt, they were getting the old trombone up the wazzoo by the British, but I think they were just looking for a fight -- and a way for burgeoning capatilists like John Hancock to make some more loot.

In short, these guys were great propagandists. Consider the Boston Massacre.

Massacre means "to kill in considerable numbers where much resistance can not be made; to kill with indiscriminate violence, without necessity, and contrary to the usages of nations; to butcher; to slaughter - limited to the killing of human beings." In short, it´s got to be profuse, inhumane carnage -- like a Toronto Blue Jays season.

Well, tempers erupted outside the Old State House one night and folks, in all, the British killed 5 townspeople, and that my friends, is what they call the Boston Massacre... the British fired after they were surrounded, pelted with rocks and other objects, and taunted by angry mobs.

Hmmmm... massacre is like beauty, I suppose -- in the eye of the beholder.

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The front tooth I chipped before leaving Yellowknife is now black. I look 10 IQ points slower and I´m sure my earning capacity has dropped by about $10,000 a year now.

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In Canadian universities, our varsity sports teams typically include basketball, hockey, football and the like.

Well, I´m sure they practice these petty activities at Harvard and MIT, but they seemingly play second fiddle to sailing and rowing.

Yes, rowing.

I always thought that was kind of some passed era, stereotypical Ivy League pursuit.

On the train to Allston when I first arrived, there were teams of rowboats out on the Charles River. And then, walking back from downtown Wednesday night, there were teams upon teams, with guys in these long, rowboat-like seadoos, barking orders at them through plastic cones.

Just like the stereotype.

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I stayed in the University part of town, between Boston University and Harvard.

Harvard is classy. It's pretty much bricktown. I walked past their football field, fenced off with this black gate. The stadium, like the gate, was obviously old and steeped with history, and the gate was all rusty, but even the rust had class and was distinguished and looked prestigious, next to the similarly coloured brick and leaves.

Boston University one gigantic strip mall of an institution. I tried to sneak into the hockey wing of the athletics department -- to search around for some signs of old Burles -- but they wouldn´t let me in because it was after hours.

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I crushed my shoulders in the hostel. I refused to get into the bed because I was sure there were bedbugs in there, as I was up scratching like crazy my first night.

Remedy for the itching? Probably showering more -- although I did have a strange mark below my left armpit and left the last day with a swollen pinky finger, from what looked like a bedbug bite.

I crushed the shoulders by sleeping on my side, wrapped up only in the blanket. It was strange.

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But not as strange as the conversation I had with a transgendered (lady? man?) person from Iran on the hostel steps one night, late.

She(?) was in Boston -- or Cambridge, I suppose -- for an entrance interview with Harvard.

She was super smart and we had a nice conversation about many things, including her telling me about her choice to attend Harvard because she(?) thought Massachuesetts was one of the more tolerant places for gay people and about how she hated being controlled and having to dress in the burka and how odd it felt to cover her body all the time, but kept dropping these sex bombs on me and trying to gauge a reaction.

Like when these three Bulgarian chicks get dropped off by these two douchebag Bostonians, and they all hug each other and the guys are obviously choked that they won´t be getting any, but try not to show it, but they hug them a little longer than is normal, hoping the girls will change their minds... but they don´t.

The whole time the person I´m chatting with is talking about what she would do with one of the girls.

I think I may have blushed.

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Boston is so quiet and peaceful after the eight days in New York.

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People here are so gaga over their sports teams in this city and the suburbs, it's scary. Every store sells some sort of bootlegged Red Sox or Patriots merchandise.

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Americans use a whole hell of a lot of styrofoam. Coffee cups, soda cups, the whole nine.

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I´ve crapped in more McDonalds the past two weeks than I ate in in the two years previous.

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Writing this from a foreign keyboard in Reykjavik -- where I have decided to forego the bike and find another way...