For the past three and a half years, Kevin Spenst has written a short story every day. On the day of his 1000th story he set off on his bike to do a 50 stop reading tour of the city...in one day.

From Main St. coffee houses to Yaletown shoe stores to downtown eastside street corners and everywhere in between, “One Thousand Stories” follows Kevin's adventures in guerilla performance art as he tells his stories to audiences both appreciative and irritated. A documentary about a writer's battle for success and consequence played out all over Vancouver.[1]

onethousandstories (Kevin Spenst) Trailer - Produced by The Lost Shots, Music by Precious Fathers & Chris Smith, and Starring Kevin Spenst.

If You Are An Extremist, Please Kill Me

Martin’s wife wasn’t at all happy with the form his political protest was taking. The constant sight of him in a t-shirt that announced to the world where he could be found to be killed was deeply unsettling. Mandy woke up most mornings with a gasp from nightmares of her husband being blown up or shot.

“I think this has gone on long enough,” she said one evening over dinner at a Mexican restaurant.
“This meal?” Martin said looking down at his fish taco.
You know what I’m talking about. Why do you have to make a joke out of everything?
“Everything’s pretty damn funny for the most part, don’t you think?”
Just then a man in his 20’s walked towards the couple’s table. He pulled his backpack up in front of him and unzipped it. He pulled out a book and a pen.
“Hey are you that guy on that YouTube video?”
“Yeah.”
“The one where you’re all like, okay so if you’re any kind of extremist and you want to blow up a liberal minded, compassionate human being my address is blah, blah, blah. You did that?”
“Yes,” Martin said and opened up his blazer to show his t-shirt.
“That’s awesome. Can I have your autograph?” The man waved the book in the air. “Sorry, this is all I’ve got.”

While Martin signed inside the back cover of the book by Bukowski, his wife stared at the young man. Martin explained the idea behind his movement of one. “It’s called assertive pacifism. You know I basically started with what Ghandi was doing and then I added a more in-your-face stance. And then it’s kind of ridiculous too which is kind of Lenny Bruce. There are so many stupid people out there who want to kill us because we’re Jewish or Palestinian or homosexual or whatever and I’m just like, enough already. Kill me. I’m tolerant of all these people. And if all tolerant people take this position, then we’ll basically temper all these extremists.

“Hey crazy you’ve got a lot of people to kill, so why not just give up while you can.”
“Cool.”
“It’s gonna be the ‘So kill me already’ global movement. You wanna buy a t-shirt?”
“Yeah.”
After the man left, Martin’s wife shook her head. “And what if that man had a gun in there. What if he was a lunatic?”
“Then you’d be there to carry on the cause, wouldn’t you?”

On his eleventh birthday Martin tore open Leonardo da Vinci wrapping paper to discover a guide to hypnosis, the book he’d wanted ever since his father took him to see the man they call Ravine. Martin’s mother worried about her bright little boy wasting his time on such a trivial pursuit but Martin’s father figured the boy deserved a change of pace from his studies in French and German and Physics and World History and God knows what else because education after all was Martin’s mother’s domain. She was a very strict kindergarten teacher for gifted students and knew that education shaped a man’s destiny. Ravine had been Martin’s father’s idea which Martin’s mother disapproved of as Ravine had not been a very good kindergarten student. She assumed.

“Thanks,” Martin shouted, holding the book up like a trophy over his head for his three friends to marvel over.
“What else do you say?” his mother asked,.
“Merci!”
“And?”
“Danke.”
“Well you might want to let your friends have a look,” Martin’s mother explained very clearly.

Klaus and Pierre who didn’t speak a word of English stared at the large chocolate cake on the table. “You might want to translate some of it for Klaus and Pierre.”
Sam, the third friend who sat in the middle of the group, was deaf and blind. None of Martin’s guests were suitable subjects for hypnosis - Martin’s German and French were still at the basic level of greetings and colors — and for this reason Martin asked his parents if he could practice on them.
They agreed.

“You are getting very sleepy,” Martin said with piercing brown eyes that bore a hole directly into the center of his mother’s consciousness. He did the same with his father, while Pierre picked his French nose.

The last light of the day filled the living-room with golden shadows.
“When I clap my hands, you will be a cobra and you will be a mongoose,” the young hypnotist commanded and the rest of the evening the young boys enjoyed the spectacle of Martin’s parents jumping and crawling and striking at each other on the living room floor.
Until Sam made the sound that he had to leave.

The man of the hour throws his empty beer can into the kitchen sink and barks out a belch. Everyone laughs.
“Beer,” he says like an animal trained to say one word. He moves his head back and into drunk angles so that he won’t go cross-eyed. To stave off stupidity. “I am not too drunk to do many things,” he says.

A deck of cards and an assortment of beer cans are scattered across the coffee table in the tiny bachelor pad that overlooks mountains that are skirted by a city bespeckled by lights. This scene is held upside-down by a large mirror of water. The lights ribbon out towards the bachelor pad.

On the balcony somebody throws up and then down the 32 floors.
The man of the hour shakes his head in disapproval and then smiles. The best man hands him a fresh beer and a shot of tequila. Everyone laughs the same laugh track.
With their minds and livers crushed under the weight of countless beers and even more shots of tequila, these men can now share their feelings, their innermost thoughts.

“I would like to impregnate a hundred women at the same time,” one man says.
“Here, here,” someone else says knocking his beer can on the coffee table.
“All of those little guys want to find the finish line but only one will make it with one woman. If a series of warm tubes could funnel and separate the sperm into different women, I’d impregnate many, many women. I mean that’s just natural and technology…” and he says the rest into a beer can.
“I would love to have sex with a woman made out of bubble wrap,” someone else opines.
And someone passes out.

Two minutes into his five-year journey, the man who was determined to walk around the globe in an easterly manner, bumped into a man who had just set off to do the same thing in a westerly direction. The sun was coming up behind his paltry shoulders and wiry hair and the man from the west squinted to size the rest of him up.

“No media, huh?”
“Hundreds of people start journeys around the world everyday but who actually sticks to it? Halfway around this’ll become newsworthy. I’m pacing my expectations. You?”
“It’s about simplicity. No need to clutter up the moment with hype, right?” He stared straight into the man’s clear blue eyes. “I mean it’s not about the fame. I’d wear a mask doing this if I could. I’d wear an empty bucket of KFC with a mask overtop if I thought it’d stay on.”

They stared at each other as traffic soared by and into their destinations. The sun was now completely suspended over the flat landscape like a giant ping-pong over a brown table. They continued to stare and then broke out into laughter.

“Dangerous trip to do all on your own,” the man from the east said. “John Kunst was shot and he was with his brother.”

“In Afghanistan. And that was the 70’s. It’s more dangerous now but as in everything you take your chances.”

They were once again stuck in a stare while trying to take in as much information as possible. Walking shoes. Backpacks. Posture. Legs. Maximum length of stride.

“Well I don’t want to keep you,” the man from the east said with a short laugh. He attempted a stretch which turned into a dash past the man from the west who simply turned to watch his lanky adversary clatter and clunk down the side of the Trans-Canada.

“Lousy amateur,” the man from the west said to himself as he started walking a little faster into the sun.
[ top ]

My dad pretends to be a klutz. He’s not very good at it and this makes the attempt look clumsier because he usually ends up falling or dropping something for real. So now I pretend to laugh when he stumbles through his slap-stick routine. This big revelation came last weekend.

We were shopping at the mall last Saturday. I was in HMV looking through the CD’s and he was in Sears buying clothes. He was going to come by when he finished shopping but I suddenly got bored with all the music. Each CD had the same kind of face staring out at me, the same “overproduced” face. (“Overproduced” is how my mom describes movies that she hates but I guess we can use it for everything in music and movies, the whole overproduced kit and kaboodle (There’s an expression my dad uses.)) Anyway, I rolled over to Sears where I found my dad in the pants section. I took cover behind a rack of slacks and pulled out a crappy magazine from my backpack and then kept watch over him as he did squats in a pair of Levis. (How Nancy Drew of me.) He looked at himself in the full-length mirror. The jeans seemed to fit okay but his brow scrunched up into a look of dissatisfaction. He stepped into the change area and came out with another pair of jeans. He did some squats again and this time the zipper came down. He seemed satisfied. As he was coming out of the change area, I rolled up to him and acted like I’d just arrived. I didn’t say anything but I started piecing things together.

“Ready to blow this popsicle stand, Candice?” he said and then pretended to trip on his laces but then he actually did trip on the rack of pants that I’d been hiding behind. There were pants everywhere. How Chevy Chase of him.

For the parent-teacher interviews on Tuesday all the pieces fell into place. Everyone crammed into our classroom and we showed our parents the science fare projects we’d been working on. (With all the volcanoes you’d think we lived in Hawaii or something.) We all sat down and listened to Mr Wallington explain the importance of blah, blah, blah. My dad stood up and concurred. He gave a short little speech like he was addressing the UN or something but the funny part was that his fly was down and then when he pretended to notice and zip it up he fell back and knocked over a volcano. (The worst one.) It was actually pretty funny even though I knew it was staged. My mom was silent the whole ride home but I kept laughing about all the future moments of him with his fly down; weddings, funerals, etc He knows I don’t get embarrassed like other kids. I get a kick out of stupidity.

After the car accident which put me in this wheelchair, my dad and I watched a lot of Three Stooges and Marx Brothers movies. It took my mind off what I’d lost. My mom kind of poo-pooed all those old movies and wanted me to read more. She says that I’m precocious and I should build on that strength but really I just have a lot of time to watch people and think about things. And I read a lot and I write even more but I’m not so sophisticated that I don’t enjoy a bit of slap-stick once in a while. I pretend to laugh at my dad slipping on a banana peel or something classic like that and sometimes I actually feel happy. The fake laughter dredges up some real happiness and I end up really laughing.

My dad used to be the most serious person on the planet before the accident. I think he read a book about the importance of comedy in times of trouble or something and that lead to the movies which lead to his new routine.
Which leads to a smile on my face.

Published June 2008.