Gerry is correct. I did walk this earth for 32 years without ever encountering the word “gunt.”

I will take a moment now to pause and reflect upon those innocent happy times.

For any old fogeys like me who don’t yet know the word “gunt,” you could probably find it in the Urban Dictionary. Be warned, however, as it is one of those words that occupies the grey area between “offensive” and “necessary.”

A new word is a new toy, and I can’t resist the urge to play with “gunt”:

-Have Gunt, Will Travel
-Annie Get Your Gunt
-All Quiet On The Western Gunt
-The Gunts Of Navarone
-The Man With The Golden Gunt [this last one doesn’t make sense. The male form of “gunt” is “gock.”]

~ Speaking of gock. I kicked a man in the nuts last Sunday.

I was doing sound at the Wintersleep / Brian Borcherdt show when I was introduced to a friend of a friend. I came in right in the middle of a conversation about nut-kicking.

“You can totally kick me in the nuts,” this guy was saying. He turned to me. “Go ahead. Kick me in the nuts.”

He explained that he had a special ability, a physical quirk, as it were, that allowed him to pull his nut-sack up into his body an instant before a possibly harmful impact.

Out of curiosity, I asked the guy if he’d ever been kicked in the nuts when he hadn’t had a chance to prepare for it. He said yes, he’d been hit by a hockey ball or something, and he’d reeled in nausea and gone outside to puke.

It reminded me of Harry Houdini, the escape artist. There’s a legend about Houdini that he used to go around bragging about how tough his stomach muscles were. He would get people to test his muscles by punching him in the stomach. That is, until someone socked him when he wasn’t expecting it, and he died shortly thereafter with a ruptured appendix.

I half-considered pretending to turn away, and then turning around and laying into the guy with a big, vicious kick in the nuts.

I don’t think I could catch him off guard, though. He stood with his arms at his sides, his feet shoulder-width apart. Clearly he’d done this before.

“So, anyway,” he said, “go ahead and try it. Kick me in the nuts.”

Some men would be reluctant to kick another man in the nuts, and it’s safe to say I was feeling some of that hesitation.

On the other hand, I believe there is a natural order to the world; whereby, if you go around asking to be kicked in the nuts, then you’re just asking for a kick in the nuts.

So I kicked him in the nuts. Poomp.

“Didn’t hurt a bit,” he said.

We stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

I said, “Aren’t you afraid they’ll get stuck up there?”

Wednesday August 27 in Hell’s Kitchen. A/V vs. Spinoza.

I’ll be performing a set of A/V songs, only with a bass guitar instead of a bunch of synthesizers. Chris Cookson from Kojo will be joining me on drums and percussion. This will be a continuous set of beats for your dancing pleasure, starting around midnight or so. There might be a guest vocalist or two along for the ride as well.

Everybody’s been emailing me wanting to know if the Mr. Macenroe story is true or if I made it all up.

I wish I could’ve convinced the cops that I made it all up. They were pretty nasty when they showed up at my house.

“Are you Philip Clark? Nice fucking sweatpants.”

They kept asking me all sorts of weird questions, like about a spate of bombings in Saint John several years ago, when a bunch of police cars got blown up. The cops seemed to think I had a chemistry lab hidden away somewhere in the house for making car bombs.

“That’s just bizarre,” I said.

Finally the police took my website and put it in a manila envelope and put the envelope in a giant Ziploc bag and then threw my website onto the front seat of a police cruiser. I could’ve cried.

Cops don’t seem to like me very much.

(P.S. Take a plastic film canister. Fill it two-thirds full of Drano crystals and pack the rest full of Comet cleanser. Drop the canister into the gas tank. It’ll take around ten minutes for the gasoline to eat through the plastic; plenty of time for you to set up your tripod.)

Welcome back to swordfight.org. The site’s been down for a while, so if you emailed me recently and I didn’t write back, please send it again.

Life’s been kind of a mess lately. Earlier this month, the cops showed up at my house on a sunny afternoon, got me out of bed.

Turns out somebody in Saint John had ratted me out over a story I posted, the one about accidentally burning down my teacher Mr. Macenroe’s house when I was a little kid.

So these three cops walked into the house and confiscated my website as part of their investigation. I lost my email account when they took the site, and a few of my friends lost their blogs as well.

I thought I was in a world of shit, frankly, and I was a little worried about what would happen. It was all a long, long time ago; but who knows.

However, Mr. Macenroe was pretty old. He’d retired a long time ago. And last weekend he passed away of a heart attack while he was washing his car in the driveway.

Somebody asked his widow about the arson investigation, and apparently her reply was, quote, “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.” So the police dropped the case, and on Thursday I was able to go down to the courthouse on Spring Garden Road and get my website back.

So here we are. I was tempted to delete the Mr. Macenroe story but screw it. He’s gone to a better place now, God rest his one-eyed soul.

I thought I’d never see swordfight.org again so I registered brokenglass.ca. I think I’m going to turn brokenglass into a community effort. A gathering place for bad people. Info: brokenATbrokenglassDOTca.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

~ Bite-sized life.

I sit at the counter at the North End Diner and cut a sausage into six pieces.

The two end pieces are eaten immediately. Then the remaining four morsels are stood on end, creating four small squat cylinders on the breakfast plate.

A piece of sausage on its side might resist attempts to spear it. The fork might glance off the skin and send it skittering across the plate.

Turned on its end, the piece of sausage may have the pleasure of receiving a fork sunk into its marrow.

I swirl the sausage around in some egg yolk. Put it in my mouth. Chew and swallow. The small spice of meat, followed by a swig of ice water.

Repeat.

chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chugchugchug chug chug chug chug

I live on Bloomfield Street in the North End of Halifax. Across the street from my house is the Halifax Civic Worker’s Club. Many social events take place at the club.

The venue often plays host to “ladies dances,” which is a euphemism for drunk lesbians puking on my front stoop.

Tonight, however, they’re having themselves a little rave. The style of music is psy-trance; which, if you’ve never heard of it, goes a little something like this:

chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chugchugchug chug chug chug chug

It’s 4AM, I just got home from work at the Marquee and I gotta get up at 9AM to drive to Saint John to open for Moneen.

chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chug chugchugchug chug chug chug chug

9AM is probably about when a bunch of trance-hippie ravers will be streaming out of the club going, “Fuckin wicked party.”

OK they just switched up the music a little bit, now it sounds like this:

chuggalugga chuggalugga chuggalugga chugchugchuggalugga

Whoops, now back to

chug chug chug chug chug chugchugchug chug chug chug chug

Anyway. Sunday night it will be our turn to annoy the neighbours. As soon as the Saint John show ends I’m driving back to Halifax to perform in the Bloomfield House living room. It’s a farewell party for Annette and it starts at 8PM. Bands performing will include Yellow Jacket Avenger, A/V and Jen and the G-Spots.

Info: bloomfieldATswordfightDOTorg.