Bitter Backed By Happy Bass

Some nights are uneventful. Some nights you just drink gin with your brother, sing Mountain Goats fragments, try to convince him their songs are optimistic, not bitter backed by happy bass. Real-life footage from an Iraqi documentary is your entertainment, and you feel bad about that. Ice cubes rattle in your empty glass. When there's no dialogue in the footage, just chants and gunshots, you continue conversation where you left off, and tell him your most brilliant thought of the night: dog walking is the social opposite of wearing headphones.

Introducing . . . Guy Studly!

Yep, here he is: the one, the only -- Guy Studly! Lennie and I were at a garage sale, and this dude was in the free box. Best score ever. You snap a beer in and he holds it for you. I named him Guy Studly for the Garage Sale initials.

I wrote this while I was at the writing workshop in Toronto: "I'm taking him with me tomorrow, whether they're ready or not. Guy Studly, my shirtless beer can-holding mannequin, can just as easily hold my can of Coke in a non-drinking environment. We'll be out there on the wall, me and the cool kids. We're the ones not wearing our name tags. We're the ones throwing around terms like parallel structure and rhinestone removal. You know, the Wayson Choy kids, oh goodness yes. But oh my. Now you know too much about me."



In the end, Sarah and I took him kayaking. Here he is doing what he does best (above).



Here he is way out of his element. I made him a paddle but he can't paddle worth shit. He'd rather just hold the beer can, hold the beer can. Guy Studly though, man, he can get away with anything.