I am an odd hybrid: Half intellectual, and half bar-fly.

Think Jeff Goldblum, but if instead of getting trapped in that teleportation unit with a common housefly, he had gotten stuck in there with a pint of honey-brown ale and a copy of one of Steven Pinker’s 600-page tomes on evolutionary psychology or the origins of human language.

I’m a best-in-class dropout from three different faculties back in my university days—engineering, physics, and education—but somewhere along the way I managed to complete a computer programming diploma, and then worked as a software developer off-and-on for a decade.

I finally wound up as the only person in the whole World Wide Web who’s allowed to touch the customer relationship management software for a global non-profit org headquartered in New York City, after they couldn’t find anyone in all of NYC who cared enough to do the work properly, even for fifty bucks an hour.

Bill Gates is a major donor to their cause.

My younger brother was the real hippie in the family, taking time off from his job to see the Grateful Dead play live a couple of times a year. I always had my nose stuck too far into a textbook or an Eastern scripture to find the idea of just hanging out and having fun to be as tempting as it should have been. So, to my eternal regret, I never got to see the Dead play back when Jerry Garcia was still with us.

If you can believe it, Jerry was actually in the U.S. Army for nine months, way back when. But he kept going AWOL, so they finally realized he wasn’t right for them, and gave him an honorable discharge. Then he lived for awhile in an old broken-down car in East Palo Alto, and Robert Hunter lived next to him in his own car, and they were both eating big tins of Army-issue pineapple with plastic spoons from Jerry’s glove compartment.

That’s how Hunter got to be the Dead’s lyricist: It was his pineapple.

If the pre-diabetic Garcia had stuck to that kind of monotonous but healthy diet in the years to follow, rather than stuffing his face with junk food, he’d probably still be alive today. When he passed away from a heart attack in 1995, they did the autopsy and his arteries were like pinholes.

It wasn’t the drugs that killed him: it was the chili dogs.

“Just say no.”

So the closest I’ve been to actually hearing the Dead play live was when I was working summers at a tourist lodge, and one of the guys in a fishing party there one year was the audiologist for the Grateful Dead.

The lodge owner was a stocky, Catholic Republican from Minnesota, who still retained the brush-cut from his own Army days—he looked like a damned hedgehog. You could easily imagine him watching reruns of All in the Family ... and cheering for Archie Bunker. So it made him very happy when I cut my (pre-hippie days) hair almost as short as his, and shaved off the beard I had kept since I was young enough to grow one, for working in their dining room.

Probably gave him hope that they’d make a conservative out of me yet.

Well, good luck with that!

In my first summer there, I shared a room with a Pakistani engineering student from Saskatchewan, named “Row-hoss”—or at least that’s what the near-retirement-age hayseed from Kansas working there called him. Row-hoss was an atheist who wouldn’t eat pork for religious reasons, i.e., “just in case” his parents’ beliefs turned out to not be complete nonsense.

At some point in our first month together in that hillbilly heaven the subject of employee unions came up, and Row-hoss mentioned a group of miners who had gone on strike because workers at another company were getting salads with their lunches, and now the first group wanted the same perk. So he had started to re-evaluate his support for unionized labor after that.

I wasn’t so sure. After all, fair is fair, and if one group is getting salads....

One of our regular casual guests was a former German POW, who had been interned in the Lake of the Woods region during WWII, and liked it so much he bought a cabin there after the war. The most unforgettable evening of all my years at the lodge was when he and his wife, and another German couple, were sitting around the table after dinner with the hedgehog, talking about how the world needed more people like Newt Gingrich to fix what was wrong with it.

Yeah, with the help of the ex-Nazis, they’ll figure it out....

And then there was the real-life “Roseanne Barr.”

Kyle’s mom (South Park) isn’t the biggest bitch in the whole wide world. I’ve worked with the biggest, fattest bitch in the whole wide world, and Kyle’s mom isn’t even close.

The fat-ass redneck in question had taught her daughters so well to emulate her that the latter brood had to be tricked, by reverse psychology, into doing their share of the work in the dining room. They never actually figured out that the tuna salad/cottage cheese plate “contest” was just a way to get them to do their share of that unwanted task.

When I walked away from all that at the end of my last summer in the fishing-sticks, I gave the owners a three-page list of grievances, each one concerning that lard-assed mother-hen and her hillbilly family.

The last thing the hedgehog said to me before I left for good was, “It’s too bad we can’t just give you guns and you shoot each other.”

I’m sure the ex-Nazi would have agreed. Probably Gingrich would, too.

So it turns out that being told that you should engage in an O.K. Corral gunfight with an obese-ape co-worker just to settle the fact that she’s an unspeakably manipulative, dog-fucking bitch is valid grounds for leaving a seasonal job early, i.e., you can still draw unemployment insurance over the winter. But with having no job to go back to the next summer, I was very happy to get on in October with a community-owned organic food store in Winnipeg—where I started out as a cashier, and ended up reprogramming the cash registers. Coming from a carrot-cake-and-granola upbringing, it was a match made in ... well, Winnipeg.

The best part of that job was the slim, nineteen-year-old, tattooed punker chick with translucent skin who was co-coordinating the store. She would have graduated at the top of her high-school class if she hadn’t been kicked out of private school on some trumped-up charges which boiled down to her pushing the envelope on their rules—skirt too short, collar too spiked, etc. In spite of the fourteen-year age difference between us, she told me numerous times over the course of the year we worked together that she (i) loved me, (ii) wanted to marry me, (iii) hadn’t met a decent guy until she met me, my brother, and the soothingly relaxed, rapping black produce-guy at the store, (iv) would throw her current husband out of the house if I’d marry her, and (v) wanted to dress me up in leather and take me to the monthly black-and-blue fetish balls she frequented.

The latter subject actually came up at staff meetings. Seriously.

The rules of the workplace, you see, are different for boys and girls, just as they’re different for Christians and pagans.

For example, in the office at that store, where you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a witch, Easter was referred to as the “dead guy on a stick” holiday. Since I was knee-deep in following an Eastern guru who emphasized the supposed esoteric unity of yoga and Christianity at the time, I actually found the remark quite offensive. But, of course, I was much too polite to come out and say so.

Then there was the time that the entire staff (except for Yours Truly) went out behind the store to smoke a joint—or “kick the cooler,” as the produce-guy put it, in the vernacular from his days working at 7-11. Later the same afternoon, I was helping the punker chick take some stuff into a nearby house, as she deftly balanced her two-year-old tyke against her waist while trying to get the house door open.

“God must be a woman,” she said. “Only a woman would think of creating hips.”

“Well,” I chuckled, “it’s a good thing there’s someone here who isn’t high, to provide some balance.”

She laughed. “I’d say that even if I wasn’t high.”

Because, you see, the rules are different for oppressed minorities than they are for oppressive majorities. And while God as a Man with a Penis would be sexist, God as a Woman with Hips is liberating and empowering.

My Deadhead brother found that all out the hard way, quite independently, in sympathetically attending several feminist-environmentalist meetings on How To Save The Fragmented, Patriarchal World. He told me later that he’d been made to feel almost like he should apologize just for being a man, by the angry Feminista radicals there.

To be fair, there are real disadvantages to being a young woman under a male manager who asks you, during the course of the daily work, whether you can experience multiple orgasms. Especially when the same manager’s response to being told by an abrasive-but-smart and very hard-working cashier-ess that he shouldn’t walk over the dormant flower-bed in front of the store, was to blow off steam with other employees (e.g., me) by saying, behind her back, “I’m the manager here, you stupid cow.”

On the bright side, one of our regular customers was a gay male couple, who would come in together holding hands, and gaze longingly at the organic cotton tampons, wishing they could use them too.

Like Steve Martin said in L.A. Story, “I could never be a woman—I’d just stay home and play with my breasts all day.”

So, on balance, I was proud to be a liberal, union-supporting, meditating, gay-positive, organic-food-eating vegetarian feminist. I donated what I could spare to Amnesty International and Greenpeace, and continued in the family tradition of voting for the social-democratic NDP. Most importantly, I wouldn’t even have considered referring to any female who had reached the age of majority as being a mere “girl.” They were women, and they deserved my respect for that.

Anyway, after nearly a year working in a high-stress environment which didn’t bring out the best in any of us, the only job I could imagine having any meaning for me was to do volunteer work for the yoga organization I had gotten involved with a decade earlier.

So I left the world of fetish balls (which I never actually attended) and mid-afternoon reefers (which I never actually smoked) for a males-only ashram in the mountains outside of San Diego, thinking seriously of remaining there permanently.

It was, after all, what God and my (invisible) guru wanted me to do.

To make a long story short, it turns out that all closed, hierarchical communities are cults waiting to happen. But at least I learned how to program in Visual Basic while down there, as part of their utterly futile, Three Stooges-like attempt at setting up a software shop at the tail end of the dot-com boom.

It was also during those nine months of “Hidden Valley Hell” that I started to grow my hair out, after years of wanting to but never being able to get through the in-between stage where it’s always falling down into your eyes.

Following that gestation, I spent four and a half months south of Winnipeg, waiting for promised work from Hidden Valley that never arrived. Then, in late November, I packed my guitar, computer, and the rest of my worldly belongings into the back seat of my ’78 Dodge—with its wonky driver’s-side door lock, temperamental hood latch, no parking brake, balding tires, and a leaking gas tank.

I said my goodbyes, and got started on my own Neil Young-like “drive of origination,” heading for the folk-music scene in Toronto.

I had to get out to clean the headlights seven hours east of civilization at two in the morning, and wound up locked out of my car (grungy hide-a-key still under the hood, whew!). Then I ran out of gas on my way into Sudbury, still half a dozen hours from T.O. (extra gas container in the trunk ... and it’s not empty, whew!), but I made it.

On my first full day here, the Toronto cops took away my car. Said it wasn’t road-worthy. Bastards!

Ah, but the Bright Lights, and the Big City....

The Star newspaper once did a piece about designer martinis and the like in Toronto’s chic Little Italy district. They interviewed a transplanted prairie guy in one of the nightclubs, where he enthused: “Back in Winnipeg, the cool girls wear thong underwear. But here, the cool girls don’t wear any underwear at all!”

My first job here, over Christmas of 1999, was at the Golden Griddle restaurant opposite Maple Leaf Gardens. The place was a cash cow back when the Leafs were playing there, but kept going belly-up and re-emerging under new management since the hockey team moved to the Air Canada Centre down by the lakeshore.

So I stopped by with a resumé, and interviewed with a pleasant gentleman named Ali. After a ten-minute chat he indicated that I’d gotten the job, and said he’d call me in a few days. But when that call didn’t come, I went back in person.

It turned out that in the interim he had hired someone else—a young, dark-skinned woman with no previous hospitality experience, who would panic if she was given a table of more than four patrons to serve.

He liked inexperienced girls a lot more than he liked guys with long hair, you see. Can’t say that I blame him for that. But, he could still offer me a job without tips, as a dishwasher and omelette-maker, where I could tuck my hair up under a chef’s hat, to meet the “health regulations.”

Of course, if long hair on a server really was a health issue, every Hooters from here to ... Hooterville, would have been shut down long ago.

Between the joy of getting regularly splashed with dishwater off of other people’s plates, and dealing with a kitchen full of Middle-Eastern cooks who couldn’t speak English properly but who still kept hassling me for how I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I lasted all of two months there.

While looking for a ship to jump to from the USS Pidgin, I applied to a seasonal lodge in Algonquin Park, and got called in for an interview.

First, they sat me down on my own to watch a video of the lodge goings-on, from which it was clear that the professionalism of their servers was nothing to be impressed with.

Then we did the interview, and the woman doing that explicitly mentioned her concern about my hair—it was a very conservative lodge, our former (Liberal) prime minister Pierre Trudeau had stayed there once, etc.

I told her that by the time the season started my hair would be long enough for me to tie back, and that I’d basically be happy doing anything except washing dishes.

She tossed out something about how hard it is to keep from getting bored out in the middle of nowhere.

No problem, I said. I’ve done it many summers before; I’ll bring my computer, it’ll be fine.

Then she leaned forward, confidentially, and mentioned something about staff doing drugs to keep themselves “entertained.”

I should have realized that she was playing “good maitre’d/bad maitre’d.” Instead, I related to her how, in walking to the interview site past the Toronto Hemp Company store earlier that afternoon, I had actually gotten approached by a dealer.

D’oh. Anyway, the point is that, even before that fatal faux pas, it was clear that my hair was an issue.

So after an intermediate (night-shift) job at a press-clippings place, I went to work for a small, home-delivery retailer—like Grocery Gateway, but for organic food. Three months into that, they merged with their main competitor, and relocated their office and warehouse to the two-stoplight rural town of Orangeville, an hour northwest of the city.

Two occasions stand out in my mind during the additional three months I spent working out in the middle of butt-fuck-there. (Motto: “Bend over, you miss it.”)

First, I was walking along the main street one evening, having just arrived on the Greyhound bus and grabbed a Veggie Delite sandwich from the nearest (and only) Subway sandwich shop.

Two rednecks drove by in the same direction, and the passenger-hick shouted out of his window at me: “Keep walking!”

Yeah, because, you know, “Long-haired freaky people need not apply.”

Second, I was walking down the same street from the other direction a month later, and stopped to contemplate a greystone building: The pavement slants significantly as the road passes beside, making it look like the walls at the end of the building aren’t vertical. So I was idly wondering where I could get a spirit level to verify whether that was just an optical illusion.

While I’m standing there minding my own business, with my beautiful long hair blowing majestically in the summer evening breeze, the same two idiots cruise by in their car, and the moron redneck in the passenger seat yells out: “You are one sexy bitch!”

I’m not gay. But if I was, that go-nowhere rural pig-fucker wouldn’t even have been in my league.

But what do you expect, when you’re dealing with people who think a Maple Leafs hockey game is a “cultural event,” and who proudly display their utter ignorance of what beer should taste like by walking around wearing t-shirts advertising their favorite brand of cold-filtered piss?

Anyway, I’d had my hair grown down past my shoulders for nearly a decade when I spent the summer of 2007 delightfully out of work, living on nachos and subs, and otherwise just hanging out on the streets of downtown Toronto with my acoustic guitar—looking for all the world like Jesus on his way to a folk festival. Practicing six to eight hours a day, spending the evenings playing open stages in bars, and hoping to meet a girl or two before the touch of grey on my right temple spreads too much further.

Growing older, and wanting to hook up with a woman half my age, to make up for not catching that punker chick (and her “instant family”) when she threw herself at me? I wrote a song about it:

GLASS HALF FULL

Bar-hopping college girl, realpolitik

Nineteen years

Thin, photogenic

Mysterious, classically pretty

Mona Lisa far from Italy

I’m unshaved, middle-aged, low on tact

But don’t count me out, girl

Opposites attract

In my unnatural habitat

A glass half empty

A glimpse of satin

Hey cutie, I’ll walk you home

Down streets of gold

Photographed in monochrome

If you’ll excuse the state I’m in

We could drink Manhattans

And sip sloe gin

With apologies, of course, to Leonard Cohen. “First we drink Manhattans, then we sip sloe gin.”

We could sit on the beach and make out

‘Til the moon hits your eye

Like Chinese take-out

I’m feeling more than amiable

With my glass half empty

And yours half full

A good pizza will keep you feeling satisfied for half a day; but with Chinese food, the joke has always been that two hours later you’re hungry again. So, if a “big pizza pie” is “amore” in the old Dean Martin song, then Chinese take-out would be ... well, a much more transient commitment.

Never went for the rose-colored tint

Peer at the world

Through shot-glass fingerprints

Not a social charge, wipe that smirk

But I was happier last year

Full-time out of work

Some of my happiest memories are of my periods of extended unemployment, when I could work uninterrupted on whatever labor-of-love project I was absorbed with at the moment, from when I got up in the morning (or later) straight through until bedtime. Breaking just for nachos and beer in the early afternoon, with the July heat drifting in through a half-open screen window. Watching all the “poor bastards [who] gotta go to work” running their rat-race outside, while I’m at my desk, blissfully reading and writing, without a deadline in sight.

Been saving up for a couch

Place is a mess, I was

Gonna clean last month

Dog died, the cupboards are bare

Bed’s not much

But I’ll buy you breakfast somewhere

I’ve never owned a couch, or any amount of furniture beyond a few chairs and a desk; so it’s been easier for me to rent places that are already furnished. And then to just move rather than clean properly, when the place got too dirty. Consequently, I’ve had a big chunk of my life packed in bankers boxes since I started working seasonally at age twenty: when you’re constantly wishing you were somewhere else, it pays to travel as lightly as possible.

Closing time, half past middle age

With a hungry stare

And four ounces of courage

Mesmerized how the brass light shines

On the butterfly tattoos

Writhing low on your spine

Make you bend like that

I’ll be your high-wire

You my acrobat

Seize the night, sex and the city

I’m looking for romance

But I’ll take pity

Hey cutie, I’ll walk you home....

So that was more or less my state of mind at the start of my “Summer of Music”—the latest leg of a long, strange trip....