Hola, Fernando!

I am at 8,046 words, and Fernando Wickham just made his debut. Him and Olivia met at a bookstore, where he recommended to Olivia that she purchase a travel anthology that he contributed to, titled He Didn’t Even Work There: Tales of the Bram Stoker Museum and Other Creepy Happenings Involving Men Dressed As Vampires While Travelling.

This is the scene where Fernando and Olivia go to Jackie's Place. You may recognize something that you worked hard on last year, and I just plagiarized.


The conversation between the pair had been so riveting (?) that no one should be surprised that they decided to go to Fernando’s favourite restaurant that was just nearby. Jackie’s Place is a little dive on Bishop’s Bridge Road. Although the recent appearance of a pawn shop and Money Mart in the same plaza may have given hope that the area’s fortunes were on an upswing, in fact their association with Jackie’s Place only made them seem seedier that they may have otherwise. Jackie’s Place just has that kind of effect. The sign is so faded as to be almost illegible. The windows have not been washed in decades, if ever.

And despite all this, in case any passers-by are confused or lost, a handwritten sign has been posted in the window: “This ain’t the Hilton.” Perhaps someone long ago, hard as it may be to believe, had made the mistake of thinking Jackie’s Place was the Hilton. But if that was the explanation for the sign, it was lost in the mists of time. Someone had once asked for the history from the owner/bartender, Jackie Bauer. He had replied in his whispery voice, destroyed by years of chain-smoking, that the sign came with the building. No one believed him, but what could anyone do about it? He just seemed like the kind of guy who could withstand months of torture, or who would urinate on his socks and hold them up to his face in the event of a gas leak.
When Olivia began to question the choice of locale, Fernando assured Olivia that Jackie’s Place was his favourite because of the music. Jackie’s Place always had the best music.

As if any evidence of this claim was needed, an Aerosmith cover band that seemed to be calling themselves “Broken Aero” was just setting up in the corner. Much to Olivia’s horror Fernando squealed, “Eeee!!! I wonder which song they’re going to play first!” Any onlooker would have wondered who was more embarrassed of the outburst: Olivia, Fernando, Broken Aero, or Jackie himself.
Soon after everyone had done their best to forget the incident, Jackie brought over some drinks to the table that neither of them had ordered. They tasted like Shirley Temples with a generous smack of ham in particularly dirty highball glasses, but the strangest part of all was the jaunty addition of drink parasol stirring sticks fashioned with bamboo skewers and Union Jack crepe paper. No one would have even thought of arguing that they didn’t add a burst of patriotic spirit to those summer sips, but needless to say, they didn’t exactly seem appropriate within the atmosphere of Jackie’s Place. Olivia wondered if Jackie had fashioned them himself; she thought of asking him, but soon thought better of it when he shuffled off angrily, probably to make more drink parasols.

The emotional first chords of “Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” shook the mouldy panels of Jackie’s Place, and the cover band’s Steven Tyler was doing an admirable job of conveying the pain and sense of tragedy one feels when watching the infamous Animal Crackers sex scene in “Armageddon,” which is widely acknowledged to be the worst sex scene of all time. A nearby group of hipsters, in between ironically swaying to the music, seemed to be organizing a beer pong tournament. Olivia overheard a particularly disgusting hipster who was wearing an American flag button-up shirt and a Budweiser baseball cap suggest that the prize should be a pack of Chiclets, a red whistle and a coupon for a six-pack of Tang. Another shitster who was wearing rolled-up pants and no shoes nodded enthusiastically, then went back to his Mac laptop and his can of beer that was in a paper bag. There was no need for Olivia to look inside that paper bag to know that inside was a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Not wanting to “miss a thing,” Fernando and Olivia eagerly joined in on the tournament.




You may also recognize words that you wrote today:

Oliva shuddered as she came across what was quite possibly he worst book she had ever “read”: "Clinical Social Work Practice in Behavioural Mental Health: A Postmodern Approach to Practice with Adults," a book that had been required reading for her class on mental illness in English literature. Reading the book may have been one of the most awful experiences of her life, even if the class hadn’t been taught by the famous movie director (of It Takes Two fame) Gordon the Vampyre. Initially she had signed up for the course because it was taught by Gordon; she had been hoping to get some insight into his feud with David Boreanaz. Gordon and David had a falling out when he refused to attend Gordon’s conference on Liminality, Inter-textuality, and (Se)duction: Buffy and Postmodern Global Cultural Meta-Narratives. Although David expressed interest, he had argued that pre/post/spacialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commits us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of antisociality/seductivity, one enunciated in a de/gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity . Obviously that had pissed Gordon off, and the two had been feuding ironically ever since. The argument reached a fever pitch at the 2010 Celebrity Hockey Tournament for Children’s Cancer Research, where Taylor Kitsch (Gordon’s protégée) threw down with David Boreanaz in Gordon’s defense.