Date #4: Kicking Pumpkins

What is the half-life of a weird date? Could a date’s innate bonkersness seduce a mind into a half-year atrophy? Did my fingers dangle perpetually over my keyboard for nearly six months since this date because of the thorax-rattling bass playing of Garry Gary Beers? Was it the effusion of winter squash aromas back in […]

Date #3: To Have & To Hold & To Wrap Around Your Finger

It took only three dates for this project to acquire its first solid crotch-kick by the wayward steel-toed boot of fickle fate. Our plan was to conjoin a random album with a visit to our beloved Jubilee Auditorium to catch the Tony-winning musical Come From Away. I’d never seen it, and it’s one of Jodie’s […]

Date #2: Respect The Maze; Drown In The Corn

By mid-1967, Aretha Franklin had released nine albums and 34 singles. Some were soul covers, most were schmaltzy and Bing Crosby-esque, and one (“Rough Lover”) was specifically about yearning for an abusive boyfriend. Most significantly, only one of those singles cracked the top 40, peaking at #37. Then, Ahmet Ertegun signed her to Atlantic Records, […]

Date #1: Smoke(d Sausages) Stack (of pancakes) Lightnin’

When Chester Burnett – Howlin’ Wolf to us lesser mortals – opens his mouth, what emerges is nothing short of animalistic. It was a fitting soundtrack as we omnivoraciously devoured two platefuls of blues-brunch delight at Johnson’s Café, located inside the reconstructed Selkirk Hotel at Fort Edmonton Park, a local historical site. We kept things […]

Date #0: I Asked Her Out; She Said Yes.

Ten years ago, I began a writing project that had been birthed by an encroaching sense of dwindling mortality. My 30s were ramping up to their inevitable crescendo, and while I had long ago achieved my ideal family situation, and while I was waist-deep in the muck of earning an overdue degree to advance my […]

Day 1,006: Sciencey Foods

Yesterday I started off writing an article, then thought I’d next-level the fucker by drinking some egg in an otherwise fine beer. This was an act of creative hubris on my part, somewhat inspired by the weirdness of how I spent my 2020: celebrating every damn National Whatever Day I could track down. That meant […]

Day 1,005: The Egg Beer Experiment

I stared listlessly – without even the slightest trace of list – at my screen this afternoon, trying to scratch my brain for a topic. Yes, I had made a habit of allowing Ms. Wiki’s “Random Article” button to guide my journey through topic selection, but toward the end of this project in 2014 I […]

Day 1,004: Summertime Can-Kicking

It’s at least 150 degrees in this stuffy upstairs office, and I have no topic at the tip of my fingers. I turned on the fan behind me, and it laughed at me. I have spent my adult life making a show of how much I love extreme heat, but without air conditioning, and after […]

Day 1,003: Forget Saskatchewan, We Want Ice Cream!

This happened often during the original project. Maybe not “often”, but frequently enough that when it happened last night, the sudden spurt of mental calisthenics felt familiar and friendly, like running into an old co-worker at a clambake. Sometimes during the nearly 33-month stretch of this project’s original run, I’d select a topic, write an […]

Day 1.002: Sea-Science In Super-Comfort

In this age of crippling wealth disparity and with the zeitgeist-du-jour trending toward treating capitalism with a derisive scoff, dare I devote a day’s typesmanship to exploring superyachts? Yes, the superyacht is a thing, and no, I can’t afford one either. And while my desire to poke my attention into the sparkling crannies of a […]