I went home for Thanksgiving this weekend.

My Dad usually picks me up from the ferry. He is always late, and I am always hungry, because ferry food is, by and large, quite foul. Dad understands that I am a growing boy, and will usually have planned to feed me something when we get home. I always take my time, because I know what’s coming once I’m done eating.

“You full?”

“Yeah, Dad; thanks.”

“Good. Here are some gumboots and a mattock. I’ll meet you outside.”

I like physical labour most of the time. Sometimes it’s fun to whack the hell out of something with a heavy hand tool, and it’s good bonding time with Dad. But he broke his wrist last month (doing something a man with two artificial hips should not be doing and which I told him I’d do for him) and he’s feeling a bit fragile and ineffectual. So he foremans. Loudly.

For those of you who have never extracted a stump, there is a good reason why a lot of people use explosives to do it.

As much as I love Dad; when I’m wet, covered in mud, on my knees in a hole, half-blind from the rain, mud and sweat on my glasses, with bloodied knuckles, I don’t want to be told which root to cut, especially since he can’t see what I’m doing. But I guess yelling at each other is good bonding time too.

Dad’s been in Ireland for the last month, and he’s been pantswettingly excited about a present he got me. He’s good with gifts, he doesn’t give them often, and he never gets outwardly excited about stuff. The best sort of gift is one that you love, but have no idea that it’s something you’d love. In this case it’s something I never in a million years would have thought to buy.

Dad got me two hand-etched Waterford lead-crystal tumblers. They cannot have been cheap.

There’s something really appealing about getting filthy and sweaty and using tools you can seriously hurt yourself with; then going inside, showering off, and drinking oily-cold vodka out of the finest crystal on the planet.

My dear dichotomous Dad, the ploughman aesthete. With a role model like him, it’s really no wonder I confuse my girlfriends so thoroughly.

Crystalware seems like a bit of an unlikely gift for a father to give a son, until you know that Dad likes nothing better than coming to Vancouver and getting wasted with his boy; away from my wonderful (but somewhat shrill) stepmother. So it’s really pretty touching. You can bet next time he comes over I’ll have a big bottle of Moskovskaya on ice.

Speaking of drinking; most of my old friends are mellowing a lot and settling and breeding and whatnot. When I come to town for visits, those visits are getting increasingly quiet and sober. But I have one friend left who considers drinking an activity...something to go do. This friend is Dan. Dan is a highschool teacher who in the summers moonlights as the ship’s naturalist on Antarctic eco-cruises. So drinking with Dan is always full of fantastic stories. I certainly don’t know anyone else who’s been to Antarctica.

Our hometown is known to be “more British than the British”. This is largely for the benefit of tourists, but unlike Vancouver we do have neighbourhood pubs, We take this into consideration when we move: what your local watering hole will be. You don’t move from Fairfield to Fernwood...you move from The Beagle to the George and Dragon.

Since I no longer have a Local, Dan decided the place to drink would be the new Irish pub downtown. We get in there and it’s all fancy and snobby and the pints are $7. It used to be a Polo Ralph Lauren store, and it still looks like it. Dan thought it was a cool thing to show me, and he was right; I was glad to see it. But mostly I was kind of uncomfortable and so was he...you should never feel underdressed in your Local. I just wanted to go to Big Bad John’s.

BBJ’s is a dark little hole where the walls are totally coated in random crap. There are old bras hung from the rafters and all kinds of old business cards crammed under the Plexiglas tabletops. The whole place is a terrible firetrap. They serve surprisingly delicious peanuts in the shell. We are Canadian and therefore tidy and polite, so most first-timers will carefully put their peanut shells into their empty beer glasses, which the serving staff will promptly remove and dump on the floor. The barman can sense a newbie or an unsuspecting drunk and will drop a rubber spider on your head when you come up to order. Always a fine time, Big Bad’s.

Needless to say, we got extremely drunk. I don’t remember much about getting home except that the taxi was a Prius and I made the cabbie open the hood and show me its engine. I crashed on Dan’s hide-a-bed, which, like all hide-a-beds, is also a hide-a-metal-bar-which-mashes-your-spine-all-night. At some point during the night, I managed to remove the mattress and drag it down the hall to the kitchen, after which I slept dreamless and blissful.

One problem which arises when I drunkenly adjust my sleeping arrangement is that I lose track of my glasses. Without them, I am as helpless as a kitten. Having worn glasses since I was eight, this knowledge is pretty deeply ingrained, so no matter how drunk I get, I always put my glasses somewhere where I won’t roll on them or step on them, and always within reach of where I’m sleeping. I know this, and yet I always worry when there are memory holes from the previous night. But this time, having moved everything around in the dark while drunk, I was more worried than normal. I also needed to get up and get back to Dad’s for my starring role in Stump Removal II: The Ceanothus.

Dan was still upstairs sleeping, and I needed his help to find my glasses in his messy and unfamiliar place. I felt my way upstairs, still in my underwear (I couldn’t find my pants, either), to discover Dan’s room door shut and strange sounds emanating from within. To my surprise, Dan’s girlfriend had crept in during my black sleep (she would have had to step over me), and they were doing boyfriend/girlfriend things which I wasn’t eager to interrupt.

So downstairs I crept. I had to sit there, helpless, unable to leave, unable to watch TV, and unable to escape the Noises From Above. I was waiting for a while, so I have to give Dan credit...the lad’s got some stamina.

When they got done and bashfully came downstairs, we ransacked the den looking for my glasses, which were nowhere to be found (I should mention this is the first time I’d met the girlfriend...she found my pants for me pretty quick). Eventually we’d moved almost everything in the room a couple of times, and no glasses.

My drunken glasses-protecting strategies are sometimes extremely convoluted, and it was getting pretty late. When you lose things, you eventually try and retrace your steps, and after an hour of blindly shooting the shit, I had a twinge of memory. I turn, and right next to me, cleverly arranged in the boughs of Dan’s false aurelia plant, are my specs.

That Drunk Matty is a cagey one, the sly bastard.

I guess it’s nice to know I have the capacity to outsmart myself.

When you grow up on an island, a good chunk of your time is spent waiting for and riding on ferries. A lot of people bitch about it, but I like the ferry lineup when the weather’s nice. In the summer, a two-sailing wait is hell, because you’re trapped in a parking lot in the burning sun (at least that’s what most people do...I usually hop the chainlink and go to the pub). But in the Fall, all you have to do is sit in your car and read. Reading in the car’s kind of nice, because you are outside, and yet not: bright sunshine, comfortable chair, and nothing to do. There’s not even anything you should or could be doing, because you are Travelling.

Thanksgiving weekend is busy as all hell. Anticipating the wait, I was there at 1, and was told that there was no way I was getting on the 3pm sailing, and likely not even the 4. So I have three hours before I have to do anything or deal with anyone. Time for a little visit with good ol’ Herb Green.

There’s this girl I might sort of kind of be courting-ish. We met because she was giving away a Sigur Rós ticket on Craigslist...long story, hence the sortakinda. She was home for Thanksgiving too, and I had told her I’d be in the ferry lines on Monday if she wanted a ride into town on the other side.

So here I am, stoned and sleepy and kind of shy at the best of times, and I get a text message from her asking where I am in the line. Three minutes later she shows up with her two best friends, who I am meeting for the first time. They put their shit in the car, and I excuse myself from accompanying them to the café in the terminal. It’s about 2:30, and at this point I have been told by the ticket vendor that I’m on the 4, and more likely on the 5. So I have plenty of time to unwind before having to deal with chatty girls around whom I want to be smooth.

At 3:10, I wake out of my snooze and notice that four lines over is moving. Sometimes they underestimate the amount of space they have on the ferry, and fill it in with a few stragglers. Nothing out of the ordinary, and no reason I should call the girls back to the car.

Suddenly my line is moving, I haven’t called the girls and when you’re in a ferry lineup, you can’t just not move your car. I’m still royally baked, and am boarding the 3 with all the girls’ stuff in the trunk. Figuring there’s no way they’ll make it on in time, I call to tell them I’ll wait for them on the other side.

I get on the boat, and start wandering around looking for a chocolate bar, still stoned and thinking I'll have the 90-minute ride to myself. And there they are! They have run all the way to the boat, dodging semi trailers and such, and managed to get on in the nick of time.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually as rambling and incoherent as I think I am when I’ve been hanging out with Herbiekins. But they were loquacious and interested in that way only a romantic interest’s girlfriends can be in a quasipseudosuitor, so I guess I did OK. The sun came out, we sat outside, and I got to read my book while the love interest dozed with her head on my lap.

All in all; a pleasant long weekend. But rereading this, perhaps I should cut down a little on the intoxicants. How I must sound to those unfamiliar with Island life! But then again, without my vices, I probably wouldn’t have much to write about.