Saturday 01 February 1986

Went to Halifax!¹ Why exclamation mark – fun. I went with $102. Got for birthday.² Bought robot dog and Grimlock³. Went to Mother Tucker’s for supper.⁴

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1. As I mentioned the day before, we packed the car to go to the gunshow. As I said, my dad was a gunsmith … he sold guns out of the house. I later learned that the RCMP would tell him every once and a while they’d picked up some thugs who were planning to break in and steal them all, which must have been incredibly stressful. But part of the business involved travelling around the Maritimes to spend a weekend in some school’s gymnasium or a Legion hall, behind tables covered with old bed-spreads, with handguns laid out in rows and wired through the trigger guard. Fat men would examine them carefully.

I would wander around looking at the other displays, and usually found myself admiring the Nazi daggers, which prompted me to read some history. I learned of how the daggers were ceremonial rewards and based on an even older Teutonic design.That was actually one of the things I most appreciated about gunshows, was seeing these historical artifacts. The fact that perhaps they were being bought by skin-heads was over my head at the time. I always saw them as collectible for their part in making the story real. So there were Nazi armbands, the sawstika flag, all that shit. When, in 1999, I saw the movie American Beauty, I could understand the sinister aspect of the father owning a Nazi artifact, but I could also see how perhaps he was being misunderstood. The fact that he was a muderous homophobe was what made him evil, not that he owned this thing … what was it a plate or something?

The Halifax gun show was actually held in a school gym in Dartmouth. We always stayed at the motels in Bedford. Going to the malls, especially the Mic Mac Mall, was always the highlight of the trip.

2. I obviously hadn’t mastered the structure of a sentence yet. Yes, I recieved $102 for my birthday, which is $2 more than what I got this year.

3. The robot dog was the Tomy Spotbot. I found two today on eBay and almost completed the circle by bidding on the mint one. So that I could go back in time and tell myself that I’d be buying another one in exactly 20 years. I decided the circle shouldn’t be drawn. Nevertheless I set it to watch. The thing is, although I think this robot is around, somewhere in the basement, I’m not sure.And so, due to memory and a lifetime of consumerist training, I think it’s a reasonable expenditure to buy another one so that it can sit on my shelf. I have until Friday to convince myself either way, for or against buying it again. Probably against. No point really.

I thought the Grimlock was the robot arm I bought once on the Feb Gunshow trip with birthday money, but Google corrected my memory. It turns out Grimlock was the Tyranasaurus Rex Transformer.

4. On Saturday Nights during the gunshow weekend, my parents would get together with other sellers and we’d go out for a big supper. This night we went to Mother Tucker’s. During my time in Halifax going to university, I only went back there once, and that was 9 years later, for my 20th birthday, 31 Jan 1995. I was on a date with a girl whose name I no longer recall, who brought me there saying you eat free on your birthday. So that’s what I did. Then they sang Happy Birthday to me, which was embrassing. Then we went to see Before Sunrise at the Park Lane cinemas on Spring Garden Rd. While at Mother Tucker’s at age 20, I remembered being there before, but didn’t have this 1986 diary handy to give me the context of it being almost exactly nine years later. I remember it seeming to be a little run down by then, the decade having made it’s mark.