Day 14- Livin' on a Prayer

You need to watch this video.

Finally passed the halfway mark today!  I'm sitting on 25,017 words and feelin' fine.  This year is really hard and I'm copying and pasting more than I ever have, but in about 15,000 words I'll be almost done.

Here is a quick excerpt where Ellie reflects on the Guac Off:

The surprise guest host was a plaid-clad old man named Toots O’Malley who claimed that he could channel the deceased Neil Hope, who was known for playing Derek “Wheels” Wheeler on the famed Canadian television shows “Degrassi Junior High” and “Degrassi High.”  He was also notably the third member and bass player of the three piece band “The Zit Remedy,” whose song “Everybody Wants Something” was one of those songs that Canadians often lamented hadn’t been popular enough, much like anything produced by “The Tragically Hip.” 

The actors who had played Joey Jeremiah and Snake had legally changed their names to match those of the characters that they had played, since they realized that they would not accomplish anything else in their lives and they might as well acknowledge that publicly and legally.  They did not seem particularly comfortable with the replacement of Wheels with Toots O’Malley, but their performance of their greatest (and only) hit didn’t show it.  They knocked it out of the park, until Stephen Tyler interrupted with the chorus of “Dream On.”  A group of sisters tried to salvage the performance by joining in, but it was clearly a lost cause.  What were they supposed to do when Steven Tyler attempted to single-handedly reenact the Animal Crackers sex scene in “Armageddon,” which is widely acknowledged to be the worst sex scene of all time?  All of the Guac Off attendees seemed to simultaneously be engaged in a battle in their heads between continuing to watch the performance (much like one continues to look at road kill or a train wreck), or backing away to let the old man embarrass himself privately.  The majority chose option one and regretted nothing.

And here is some background on Ellie:

Ellie is the kind of person who is perpetually searching for something.  Whether it is the other sock, a CD to fill the empty case, or even true love, she is always on the lookout.  The thing about people who are always looking for something is that it’s usually because they lose things easily.  Her clothes dryer clearly was feverishly eating socks whenever it was left alone, and she could always somehow manage to ruin a perfectly good relationship by demanding too much of people.  Of course, we can all agree that some things are best left behind.  For instance, she had expected Griffin McCauley not to act like a know it all self-serving asshole, and he too had let her down.  Distance brings clarity and perspective, two things that brought into sharp focus just how little Griffin McCauley would matter to her in her life.  All her father had ever given her was a keen understanding of the intricacies of hockey and a perpetual fear of becoming an alcoholic because it clearly runs in the family.  The problem there was that she stopped expecting anything from him at all, and at a certain point it was just easier to stop expecting him to show up in her life.  He obliged.

But just the same, you’re bound to miss some of them. 

Kiefer, the first man that she had ever loved, was of course exactly like her father in the worst way possible.  He had a penchant for getting drunk at the local dive bar and performing forgettable renditions of Billy Joel songs with a carnation in his waistband until she got off work at the Applebee’s around the corner that she worked at to put herself through university at Queen’s and could pick him up.  He always said that he was just having fun and everyone around him seemed to agree, but couldn’t he see that she didn’t think it was fun that he scared her the way that her father always had?  He was an English major who was probably so full of himself that he thought that he was channeling Ernest Hemingway, and he was always there for class the next day, but couldn’t he have stopped because she asked him to about a million times?  But she loved him, and as much as she knew that they were falling apart she couldn’t imagine a world without him at the centre of it.  Eventually, he was the one who did that kind of imagining that soon became reality.  It was probably just as well, since he was now a successful author whose books were once referenced in one of Margaret Atwood’s tweets.  To this day, when she thought of him, her heart would seize up as if she had been bitten by a poisonous snake.  This was funny since she had in fact once owned a poisonous snake named Rocky BalBoa (who was not a Boa constrictor, but that obviously wasn’t going to stop her from naming him after the legendary raw egg drinker), who she had expected to be a vegetarian because she thought that it was the right thing for him to do.  I probably don’t need to tell you how that worked out.

The Beatles once wondered where all the lonely people come from, and where they all belong.  Ellie was always wondering that very same thing.  But she didn’t want to look at all the lonely people, because what if everyone was actually looking at her?