A Wee Wobbler In The Works And The Grinch’s Birthday Font Funk
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Happy St. Patrick’s Day all!! The only celebratory day of the year when you can set your watch to my feeling like I wanna get on a plane and head back to Montreal. Sunday was the annual parade, No. 138 or something like that, an event I attended every year after reaching the age of majority and one of North America’s great civic piss-ups.
Jakarta offers poor competition – weird living in a city with so few Irishmen – and sometimes I feel like I’m the only one listening to The Pogues and The Dubliners morning to night.
However, my lovely leprechaun and I are off to Flanagan’s Pub in the Sari Pan Pacific Hotel later this evening for a wee dram (or as it says on the back of one of my James Squire beer coasters: “I’m off for a quiet pint - followed by fifteen noisy ones” : Gareth Chilcott). I’ve heard it’s disappointing but the name is kinda Irish and with any luck it won’t have Styrofoam menhirs, tiled Druidic circles and wall-sized paintings of guys with horned helmets, more Norse than Celt methinks.

Anyway, it’s my birthday Tuesday and time for radical changes.
First, I figured I’d go and get a full makeover: Head shaved and goatee shorn and maybe re-punch that left earring hole as my hair and wannabe Van Dyke are getting uncomfortably long and I haven’t worn a hoop in a couple of years. Then I looked in the mirror and thought, “Nah, I’ll make me look like a big ol’ fag.”
Then, I figured a new wardrobe. Met a fellow at the new whitey bar in the Mandarin a week back – yeah, I went back even though the clueless heathens put ice and water in my $7 single malt the first time ‘round – and met a fellow dressed in a light black suit and tie-less white shirt with a cigar plugged in his mouth and thought he looked every inch the cool operator (which of course he may well be, nudge, nudge, wink, wink). But I looked in the mirror and thought, “Nah, I’ll make me look like a big ol’ fag gigolo.”
I thought about maybe rewriting the lifestyle script with a rewarding NGO job: Imagine, Grinch The Good as the poverty- and oppression-beating aid worker in the midst of a funding squeeze even as he builds bridges between cultures, developing local capacities and empowering stakeholders! But alas, the needle on my irony meter buried itself in the red and that was the last we spoke of it.
But, I think I’m on the right track now.
I’m trying to do something that’ll be subtly noticed but won’t take the edge off – “You’ve done something with your INSERT WORD Mr. Grinch but it certainly doesn’t make you look remotely like a big ol’ fag” – something that reflects the newly acquired wisdom of the 38-year-old Grinch without succumbing to the affected world-weariness of some fellow travelers, assertive yet calm, dynamic but understated, modest n proud. Yeah.
So, I’ve decided to change my font.
For years now, since I broke with that accented version of Typewriter Ancient on the old chunk of metal I used for school projects, I’ve been hooked on various versions of Times New Roman. In part this is because, if I’m not mistaken – I’m working on memory here so bear with me you anal retentives who know better – the original Macintosh Apple II we had at home used it.
Later, when a thousand fonts became easily available, I stuck by TNR because it’s classic sticks hooks and bends give words an air of newspaper-of-record authenticity and if one is searching for anything as a young journalist, it is to be authentic.
Since that time, I’ve occasionally strayed. There were the months of boxy Courier New when I was redesigning “Good Health” magazine but that was never my idea of a good time, and a brief fling with the staid and serious Garamond which wanted commitment before I was ready. There was the impetuous Georgia which grew more seductive the more you let out the tracking, and a tight-assed and claustrophobic Tacoma; there were Arial’s windy landscapes and ages it seems with Century, but inevitably I ended up back with patient, stolid TNR.
Now’s the time to strike! I’m not sure what I’m gonna do about this font conundrum but I do remember sweet days of mountain air several thousand feet above the Bow Valley, a place where the rams crashed heads and elk attacked industrial-sized garbage cans in the haze of their rut. It was there by the shores of the Tokien-esque glacier-fed emerald green lakes at the base of Chinaman’s Peak that I first set eyes on the spirited Palatino.
I know now that I wasn’t mature enough at the time – gosh, was it really 1992? - to deal with its demands for space. After years of TNR predictability, the way Palatino marched off screen and refused to hyphenate properly despite the tender ministrations of those early versions of QuarkXPress kept me awake nights, chain-smoking and muttering over bitter instant coffee in a dimly lit backroom of the Banff Crag & Canyon.
No I’m not drunk! You who knew me then, you saw the obsession, the permanently red eyes of the sleep-deprived. And you’ll have heard rumours of that ugly incident with the Xacto-knife in the composing room. Lies and exaggerations! The workings of evil, small-minded resort town gossips with nothing better to do with their time. You’ll also remember the RCMP never charged me and that the therapist said I was okay. Remember?
Ahhh yes, the Palatino years. Perhaps now I’ve the patience to let her come to me rather than forever stalking, I mean, searching for her, the maturity to surrender control in the interests of a long term relationship.
Yes. Yes, I’m thinking Palatino. Palatino. Wherefore Art Thou Palatino?