You can call me Ralph

by RAF KATIGBAK

I hate making decisions. If it were up to me, I would have a Magic Eight Ball permanently fused to my left hand so that if a friend called in a panic saying, “I think my girlfriend is pregnant, should we keep the baby?” I would coolly raise my hand and reply, “Outlook not so good.”

It’s not that I have faith in destiny or something kooky and esoteric like tarot cards or the Kids Help Phone, but I just can’t seem to make an informed decision about anything. When it comes to important things like my career or future, I basically become a nervous wreck that wishes he lived in one of those craters on the moon or the ones in Edward James Olmos’s face.

As an adolescent, my panic quickly taught me not to bother with bullshit like “weighing the options” or “thinking about the consequences.” I just did it, or I didn’t. And then I spent the rest of my life regretting whatever choice I made. Things just seemed to go way faster that way.

I clearly remember as a kid my friend S. telling me I should steal some WWF Wrestling Superstars figurines from the Pharmaprix. He said it would be fun if we spent the afternoon shooting them with BB guns and putting them in what in retrospect were clearly gay scenarios. But instead of pausing and having some kind of moral quandary about notions of ownership and right and wrong, I just shrugged and stuffed those motherfuckers in my schoolbag. That night before I went to sleep, it hit me: “Oh, I guess I’m a shoplifter now.” And the rest of the night was spent lying awake wondering how I would fare in prison and considering what would be a more menacing weapon to hold up depanneurs with when I went on my inevitable crack binge (I decided a carpet knife would have just the right amount of threat and desperate uncertainty).

Then there was the time in high school when I was madly in love with a girl, T. We had just started spending a lot of time together, and one night in a park, she was complaining about how she wished guys were more forward, and that if a certain guy she was hanging out with liked her, she “wouldn’t mind if he just tried to kiss her…on the swings.” Of course I didn’t, and I spent the rest of the week justifying the choice in my head. “Maybe she wasn’t talking about me… and that seemingly obvious mention of a guy kissing her ‘on the swings’ wasn’t a reference to that actual moment, but some kind of slang about some other guy kissing her on… umm… her boobs?” But the pain of regret and not knowing far outweighed the possible shame of being spurned. And besides, it wasn’t anything a little self-hatred curled up in a shower listening to the Cure’s Disintegration album didn’t alleviate.

Of course, I’m only talking about this because I had one of those life-defining dilemmas recently. You see, the other day, I decided I needed to eat better, so I went and did the obvious thing: shopped around for one of those meal replacement shakes. Either the guy at the health/bodybuilding supplement store was a great salesman or I was scared to say no to a guy with a neck so thick his head looked like a fleshy volcano, but somehow I came home not with a six-pack of meal supplements with a happy yoga-panted family on it, but rather six pounds of isolated whey protein powder in a tub the size of my head that featured a huge rippling torso with lightning bolts all around it.

Without looking at the instructions, I dropped a couple of scoops of the stuff into a blender and made myself a thick shake with the consistency not unlike dry-wall spackling. And then downed it. Then I had a steak sandwich.

I soon learned the strange intoxicating effects of protein overdose. You get dizzy, you feel nauseous and you sort of trip out as if you had just eaten magic mushrooms but without the euphoria and sense that the secrets of the world are all contained in a single bootleg Phish concert.

Once again, I was faced with a dilemma: continue to feel like total shit and ride it out like a man, or take my health in my hands (or rather my two fingers) and be proactive about my condition, like a man. To puke or not to puke. That was the question.

The continuation of Raf and his Amazing Technicolor Yawn Coat next week…

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA