Hello Darkness! The Official Blog of Helen Keller

For some strange reason, I’ve been seeing that Tim Horton’s commercial wherein the young pair of college-age boys embark on a journey of homoerotic self-discovery on their way across Canada, stopping at every Tim Horton’s they encounter. And then, there’s some old shitty couple with nothing better to do than run down the fucking clock by traveling cross country drinking at Tim Horton’s.

Quite frankly, the ad sucks. Losers with nothing better to do than drive around stopping at various coffee restaurants is a pathetic base for an ad. Especially since the ad is apparently based on a real life pair of a pair of losers. Then…it dawned on me! What would make an awesome ad would be an individual driving through the drive thru. I don’t mean pulling up to the speaker box, cracking out “double double and no, I don’t want a fucking breakfast sandwich” before tossing my $1.43 at a surly teen. I mean square on, perpendicular, right through the fucking wall in which the drive-thru operates. No speakerbox, just a fair amount of warning by way of honking and then, KA-FUCK-BLAM, hi, I’m here, I’ll just have a crueller. It would be so spectacularly manly that men around the nation would replace their nuts with pictures of me drinking Tim Horton’s. Police officers would weep as they turned in their badges. Tim Horton’s would become so rich it could buy England and make all the ugly women bear-claw each other for some of their shitty English fare, like toasted jam-huggies or whatever.

The idea was flawless. It was the execution of the idea that gave rise to my pending sentence.

The Vehicle

I’m not prepared to lose my car in any endeavour. Fuck that. So, I had to procure another vehicle. The main problem, I thought, would be that in order to keep consistency in the commercial, I would need the same vehicle through-out so as not to confuse dumb people. But how to get a sturdy enough car that could withstand repeated high-speed impacts into glass, brick, steel and the occasional dickhead teen too dumb to abandon the headset and run? GM doesn’t make it. Honda doesn’t make it. I don’t have access to any military hardware. Let’s try Toyota!

Back from Toyota

Interesting side note: Toyota doesn’t give a shit why you want a Corolla, but the bank sure does when you proudly blurt it out to them while applying for the loan. Fuck.

Another vehicle

I had a thought about a bicycle, but on the way back from the Toyota dealership, I saw a kid skid his bicycle into the side of a school bus. His head made more of a dent than the bike. Wait a titch…a school-bus? It would be perfect! I don’t need any research to support this conclusion, just look at those big yellow attention grabbing rockets of television ready steel!

Interview with the local School Bus company

Just so everybody knows, the Toronto District School Board does NOT want you to be honest in the job interview concerning future career goals with the school bus. Specifically, THEIR school bus. However, if you want to hear a pained lecture on responsibility, endangerment of children, various forms of lawsuits and general degradation of your character, Peggy in Human Resources is the fucker to see. Frankly, I’m disappointed Peggy didn’t see the publicity opportunity.

Getting the school bus

This part was easy. I’ve discovered that the elderly tend to drive school buses. I’ve also learned that the elderly are desperate for younger human contact not likely to “stroke out” on them 3 minutes into a conversation about their kids, they’re keen to help and if they get uppity, they can easily be brought back into line by the mere threat of swinging a frozen cabbage in a grocery bag. Easy pickin’s.

In truth, when I faked my Ebola outbreak to get the bus driver to stop the school bus before giving him the Dougie Gilmour head-fake and into the driver’s seat, I didn’t guess the old cocksucker would have a cellphone and his concern for my well-being would lead to him calling an ambulance. I figured he would just wait at the side of the road and since all old people have alzheimer’s, he would eventually forget what he was doing and wander away in search of delicious chicken wings.

Fun with the Stop Signs

Bus stop signs can afford a man a lot of undue power. I had every last bitch on the road driving in fear that I would whip on the signs when he least expected it. It happened to be a rainy day, in the fall, so I’d angle some loser with a piece of shit car towards wet leaves, pop on the signs and watch buddy take the world’s ugliest slip and slide into somebody else’s fucking bay window. At one point, I was getting so good at it, I managed to send some shit through a driveway basketball game sideways and into the net. I yelled out the window “Three pointer y’all!” but they were too busy crying about busted ribs and punctured lungs.

What I didn’t expect is that when you stop the bus with the signs on, little kids are dumb enough to try and get on. I wasn’t paying attention one time and a few of the more determined climbed into through the windows. I decided kids need a hero and they seemed pretty enthused about driving THROUGH the drive thru so off we went. Leave it to the police and news crews to misinterpret kids on a joyride for child hostages.

The roadside takedown

Police are finicky people. You’d think they would have enjoyed my ingenuity in getting on television, what with it involving Tim Horton’s and all, but apparently, a duty to keeping the peace and protecting the innocent got in the way. Also, buses don’t drive well at fucking all when you blow out the majority of the tires on a spike belt.

Off we went, like a sparking road-rocket, down a suburban side road with only one good tire. The kids, I must say, were doing rather well themselves, having adjusted to the rough bumpy conditions with some laughter, some tears and copious amounts of vomit.

Apparently, with only one tire to drive on, buses will flatten out their wheels, rendering them useless rather quickly. Also, when said bus ruins all the wheels, the brakes, gas and steering wheel (your three lone inputs into affecting the overall motion of the vehicle) become moot and you’re left to the mercy of Mother Nature. Or in this case, a ditch.

The aftermath

As you can most likely imagine, Tim Horton’s declined to have my story as a series of commercials. The official statement was polite, but one of their representatives at my trial stated Tim Horton’s didn’t want to be known as the “Jodie Foster” to my “John Hinkley”. I think the judge was rather subdued by the amount of bandages I was wearing, in addition to the burned nipples from the Taser I got when I yelled about “what the real crime is” back in the ditch. Most people kept their distance from me since the ebola confusion had never really gotten cleared up.

In the end, after the brief stint in provincial jail and this written statement of remorse published in a public place, I think I can safely say I’ve learned that there are things to do and things not to do to garner attention, nor influence a multinational corporation’s ad campaigns, nor “risk the lives of children” (who, despite the tears, were most likely thrilled at the ride…).

I’ll have to be much more thoughtful in planning the series of lectures on the world-wide dangers of landmines I have to give to school children to complete the last of my conditional sentence. I figure nothing can go wrong with turning off the lights, blaring Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and forcing a death-match game of tag.

What could possibly go wrong?