My Mayan Education

So for the first day off after arriving here in Edmonton, I decided to indulge in a little trip to the local science museum here. I attended the one in Ottawa and experienced my first earthquake, so I was anxious to see what Edmonton had to offer me.

I did the rounds of learning a thing or two about the human body, little science displays that would let you create lightning and tornados, buttons that you’d push to blow a puff of some foul smell you’d have to identify, and interactive visual tricks that make you dizzy or see colors that aren’t really there. But the added bonus here was a chance to sit in on a planetarium-like display documenting the mythology of the ancient Mayan civilization. I thought, “Cool! I never got around to watching that shit ass movie ‘2012’ about their idea of the end of the world synching with the end of the Mayan calendar…now I won’t have to. I’ll get the facts!’

Oh good God people. We have nothing to worry about come 2012.

First of all, has anyone stopped to consider that a lot of people are freaking out over the fact that the Mayan calendar comes to an end in 2012, (Oh God, it’s the end of the World!), but never stop to think that maybe the reason it stopped was due to, oh I don’t know, their civilization being wiped out? If the Mayans could predict the end of existence, could they not find the foresight to predict their own fate?

Just sayin’.

So, onto the movie. First of all, our planetarium in Winnipeg is balls compared to this one in Edmonton. I’ll tell you, James Cameron can stroke everyone off with his new 3D hype, but THIS is the way movies should be made in the future. I have never felt so immersed and enveloped in a film like I was watching this documentary. It was crazy cool. Until I started listening to what was being said.

So to start off my little lesson in the ancient Mayans, it stated that this was all based on what is the ancient myth of the Mayans. “Myth”… meaning, “Not real”. So this is all about as real as “Lord of the Rings” or “Harry Potter”. It starts off by saying that the earth was one great big ball of water and that it wasn’t until a giant turtle rose up out of the deep with what is now the earth we walk upon resting on its giant back. Oh yeah, and during this little time in history, the sun and moon don’t exist yet. I’ll come back to that but for now, let’s move on.

So yeah, giant turtle…didn’t see that coming did ya!? Now the Mayans were not born out of clay, wood, ribs or whatever is the traditional bible idea these days, but in fact were created out of corn. Mmm Hmm…corn. The cob variety I believe. Now there were two boys, (whose names escape me) that lived upon this new found earth on the back of a mother-fuckin’ turtle that were a couple of rascally little buggers. They would play a game of soccer in the corn fields at all hours of the night. Course that could read, “All day” too, but again, there is no sun or moon yet. I’m getting there.

One day, the lords of the underworld, (i.e. Hell) looked upon these two boys enjoying themselves playing soccer in the friggin’ dark, and grew jealous of their fun. So they challenged them to a ball game in hell. If you ain’t shaking your head yet, you will be soon.

Now then, the first World Cup goes down in hell! And due to the two boys cheating, (they pride themselves on cheating!) they not only beat the devil, but they also recover their dead fathers head, not his body, just his head, plant it in the ground, which of course turns into a big ol’ stock of corn, which grants them immortality by transforming them into the sun and moon respectively.

I wonder if the origin of pot was based in Mayan, “reality?”

It was on the very first day that the sun rose up in the sky that they began what is known as the “Mayan calendar”. So to clarify here, before anybody checked out to see what the entire world looked like in the light, before seeing what each other looked like in the harsh light of day, or what the land they lived on looked like, they came up with a very complex system of measuring the rise and fall of this new, scary-as-fuck, ball of fire in the sky to make a measurement of time?

I call bullshit! Well, I called bullshit when they said the turtle bit, but I’ll call double bullshit now!

Now I’m a man of facts when it comes to our history. I’m on the side of evolution if only because it’s been proven as hard cold fact. Call me crazy! So I have to wonder how far back in time the Mayans are figuring this all officially began. Because I’m fairly certain that the dinosaurs were here a hell of a long time before we ever started looking humanoid. And they sure as fuck weren’t stumbling around in the dark.

So ladies and gentlemen, those of you who are still fretting over some little superstition about the world coming to an end in 2012, think about it. This is a religion that even Scientologists are looking at and thinking, “Well that’s just fucking stupid!”

Make plans for 2013 and beyond people, we’ll be here for quite some time!

Niagara Falls

Tattoo #3.avi

Day 9+10 - Toronto Starts!

Day 8 - Pork Day!.avi

Day 8 - Parliament Day.avi

Tattoo #2.avi

Day 7 - Home sweet home

Day 7 - Ottawa! and a little rant on Montreal Fringe

Chicken Little

When I was 5 years old, I was living in Montreal with my family and attending kindergarten. Around the time of Thanksgiving, the school decided to put on a play for the holiday. The play was based on the story of "Chicken Little". That's the one where, "The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!!" I was Chicken Little. This was where it all started. This moment, right here, was to be the first step in the long road to doing my own material for the Fringe Festival.

Backstage, I'm a three foot nothing kid with freckles and a Beatles-style haircut getting fitted with a cardboard bandana with multicoloured cardboard feathers for a head piece. They placed my skinny little arms in skinny little cardboard tubes which had the same cardboard plumage as the headband hanging off each one to act as chicken wings. They strapped on a beak of some sort on my face which would always move around anytime I moved my head and poke me in the eye. This meant I had to move my whole body if I wanted to look at someone. The teacher dressed me up, stood back and gasped, "You look fantastic!" I felt like a huge dork.

So the name of the game was this. As soon as the lights came up on the stage, I was to walk out to the center, look out at the crowd and wait for an apple to come flying out over the backdrop directly behind me. As soon as I hear the 'thump' of it on stage, I am to deliver the key line of dialogue, "The sky is falling!!" Then the show would start. We had gone over it a number of times over the course of a month so that there would be no way that my daydreaming, five-year-old mentality could forget what to do. Wait for the apple, say the line, get on with the show.

As I stood there in the mockery of a bird costume under very hot lights, I looked out to the crowd and saw a sea of parent-like faces looking back at me. As I patiently waited to hear the sounds of an apple close by, I did what every performer tries to do...find mom and dad. Before I could spot them though, out of the corner of my eye, in what little peripheral vision I had left between the head-dress and the beak, I saw a red blur whiz by my head. The apple has arrived! But it bounced on the stage, bounced off the stage, and kept rolling on right into the front row. The apple has left the building.

In a flash my brain assessed the situation. I cannot go on without the apple on stage, it would destroy the illusion of realism we've got going for us right now. I can't go out into the audience and pick the apple up, I would be interfering with the forces of nature and instead become a false prophet for my apocalyptic prophecy and do away with the idea that I am but a dim-witted jester in the grand scheme of fate. Deep thoughts for a 5 year old. I'm cool like that.

But as fate would have it, the apple rolled right in front of a familiar face in the crowd. My big sister. A glimmer of hope flashed in my eyes, 'She can save me! Tara can save me!' These were innocent times. A time when a young brother doesn't fully realize the unadulterated hate and disgust an older sibling has for the younger model. And as my eyes widened and pleaded for her help, my arms firmly attached to either side of my body, my right hand flicking spastically trying to signify to my sister, "Throw the apple up HERE", a smile crafted by the devil himself grew across my sisters face. She tossed the apple up and down in her hand a few times and mouthed the words, "Oh! You want...this apple?"

My eyes began to twitch and burn with the words, "YES!"

It's at that point that my sister, who in her entire life has never had any interest or aptitude for sports, rounded her arm behind her head, and fast-balled the apple towards center stage. At Mach-5, this red round missile hit me right between the eyes. Now if you take a moment to recall the sound that echoes in your jaw when you take that first bite out of an apple, and the sound of a wooden baseball bat hitting a big fat softball right out of the park, and mix those two together, you get a pretty gruesome sound. And the audience knew it too, because they all said as one, "Ooooh!"

I'm five years old. I just got blasted in the face by my big sister in front of a room full of adults and all the cool kids in Grades 1 through 8. All my friends were waiting in the wings. And I couldn't see my Mom or Dad anywhere. I wanted to cry. My eyes were way ahead of me, holding back the tears on the lower edge of my eyelids for the very moment that my lip started to quiver. It felt like my face was on fire, (and I was most definitely cross-eyed) but I stood there for what seemed an eternity and came to a realization that has served me well ever since. The show must go on.

So I stiffened up, looked out to the crowd and said in a very weak, heartbreaking voice, "Oh! The s-s-sky is f-f-falling!!" and marched over to stage right to find my good friend Henny Penny. I looked up at the Hen and thought, 'Man, your costume sucks!' without realizing she was a mirror image to my own costume. The girl just stared at me in awe of my sheer courage for going on with the show. Either that or she was shit scared that apples were actually being thrown from the audience if you gave a sucky performance. She looked at me almost horrified and said, "Are you okay? I saw the apple." I tried to brush it off and quickly said, "Yes, I'm fine! Come on, the show must go on!"

Off to the other side of the stage we went to find our other friend, Goosey Loosey. Same thing as before, I get there and my friend is peering out at the attacking audience in fear for her life. She took one look at me and tried to say, "Are you okay?" but I just stammered and flicked my pathetic cardboard wing towards the stage saying, "I'm fine! C'mon!" It went back and forth like this until we had a mass of frightened, cardboard-clothed children on stage. The story finishes off by having the whole flock of bird characters die by being eaten alive by a Fox, all but one very lucky Chicken that is, who then gets to tell the King about the oncoming apocalypse and that his entire posse, (or "Fellowship of the Apple") have been consumed by a fox. For his reward, the King sick's his dogs on the Fox and restores life to the Chicken Little gang, (how he does that exactly, I have no idea).

The only question I have in regards to the whole story is this: What the hell did any of that have to do with Thanksgiving? I'm pretty sure the teachers just saw Thanksgiving = Turkey. Turkey = Chicken. Chicken = Little. But what is the message? Is it that we must be thankful for all that we have and that it might all be gone one day so abuse it all while you can?

or...

Is the message a warning not to be like the little Chicken who jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, where upon the unscrupulous Fox would no doubt use the lies to manipulate the rest of the world for his own benefit?

The answer...

Who gives a shit? I'm five years old, I got smashed in the face with an apple, and I'm about to get an ice cream cone for a job well done. The sky be damned!