The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

My personal trainer found a sponsor for his entry into a bodybuilding competition and hasn’t been seen since. No one — not even his co-workers at the gym — know where he is. Emil (one of the trainers) and I discussed this.

Emil: Hey there. Say, you lost some weight?

Me: I did?

Emil: Since I last saw you. You look thinner, especially about the face.

Me: Well, you’re the second person to notice my getting into shape. You’re not as cute, but thank you.

Emil: Heh. The workouts going well for you?

Me: Yeah, and the meal plan that Mike set up for me helped, too.

Emil: Ah, Mike. We [points to a co-worker] were just talking about him. Nobody knows where he is.

Me: He didn’t even tell the managers he was leaving?

Emil: No, he just…disappeared [makes a gesture with both hands, as if disappearing in a puff of smoke].

Me: Weird.

Emil: And it’s hard to imagine him disappearing. You can’t easily hide that much muscle. When he was training for the competition, he got really huge.

Me: Drinking all that WheyDelicious pays off.

Emil: “Delicious chocolate flavour!”

Me: Every now and again I throw in a scoop of ice cream. It’s not bad.

Emil: It’s pricey. But Mike said he could get it for me cheaper than retail.

Me: You know, he said the same thing to me too. And in a under-the-table kind of way — as if he were a guy dealing pot. He said he could get me Nitro-Tech bars and WheyDelicious at a serious discount.

Emil: Yeah, he always got quiet whenever he talked about the deals on supplements.

Me: You’d think there was a protein mob.

Emil: A creatine mafia.

Me: A cartel that controls all the whey, soy and red meat in the world. Big Protein.

Emil: Maybe he double-crossed ’em.

Me: Mess the with protein mob, pay the price.

My friend Jay Goldman drove to New York this weekend. He decided to try the legendary Grimaldi’s pizza under the Brooklyn Bridge, which consistently ranks first in the Zagat survey year after year. While waiting in line, he struck up a conversation with a woman who turned out to have the same camera as he did. As the conversation progressed, he found out that she was also originally from Canada, as were her husband and the two friends from out of town that they were showing about. The woman and her hubby, it turned out, went to Queen’s University; the hubby was a manager at the engineering pub where I was the DJ and wrote for the weekly humour paper whose offices were my second home.

Jay thought that there were too many coincidences not to ask “You wouldn’t happen to know Joey deVilla, would you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” she exclaimed. “Does he know everybody?”

The woman in line was my friend Alicia (a.k.a. “Leesh”), the hubby my old buddy George (they’re the people who are neither me nor Iron Chef Japanese in this picture), and the two out-of-towners with them were my pals Chris and Rob, who’d gone down to Manhattan for the H2K2 conference.

The fact that I can exasperate Leesh even from a great distance amuses me to no end.