Well, not really. I think I would rather watch eight hours of Degrassi reruns in a row than go fishing. My family, friends and acquaintances who enjoy fishing are rolling their eyes right now and thinking: “this coming from a guy who spends hour after hour trying to get a little white ball to fall into a ridiculously small hole. And all the while offering profanity-laced commentary.” To that I say, whatever! My aversion to fishing is that it’s too exhausting. You’ve got to cast the line, open a beer and take a seat. Whew! I’m fatigued just thinking about it.

All kidding aside, I’m off for a family vacation for the next couple of weeks and I actually might go deep sea fishing. We’ll see. Therefore, blog posts may come sporadically or not at all over the next couple of weeks. It will all depend on whether something funny as hell happens while we’re on vacation. Which usually happens in our family.

I thought a fitting way to end the week was to comment on a recent phenomenon happening here in Ontario. Not sure if it’s making its way to other parts of the country but I hope it does. It’s about random acts of kindness and by all accounts, it appears to have started in Ottawa. For some reason it all centers around coffee. Last week a man walks into a Tim Horton’s coffee shop in Toronto and asks the cashier how much would it cost to buy 500 medium cups of coffee. The response was $825. He pulls out his wallet, plunks down $825 and says “I’m buying the next 500 cups of coffee.” He then walks out of the coffee shop without giving his name and he didn’t bother to wait for the people standing in line behind him to say thank you.

More of these stories are coming to light and I think it’s so cool. Not many can afford to drop $825 worth of coffee on total strangers but one cup of coffee every now and then? I think so. But what is really cool is how these random acts of kindness generate stories. The recipients of the free coffee will tell at least one person about what happened to them that day. How many of us can say that we did something so selfless and kind that at least 1000 people are talking about it? So I tried it this morning, on a very small scale. Every street in downtown Toronto is being dug up, resulting in brutal traffic congestion. I work at the corner of Bay and Richmond and a portion of Richmond is closed due to road work. There are two police officers monitoring the intersection and as I walked by them today I said, “gent’s, I’m just on my way to Tim’s, can I get you a coffee?” The police officers were most gracious but declined. And I walked away feeling a little better because I made the gesture and I also know that I just created 4 new stories about simple kindness.

Until next time,

Cheers