Now skids are very crucial in understanding The ‘Shwa. They’re the key, i’d say. In trying to explain them recently to a friend, he asked if they were like urban hicks. Yes and no, i had to reply. They’re a very particular subset of the human animal who can only be fully understood through rigorous exposition, or twenty years’ experience living in The ‘Shwa.

A skid, to my knowledge, is a grown-up 14-year-old whose tastes and interests seem to have stopped somewhere back in 1977. Skids have a particular style of costuming which can include black jeans, JP’s (jogging pants), stirrup JP’s (often pink or light purple), jean jackets, zippered windbreakers, tear-aways with no shorts underneath so their tighty whities are often visible through the gaps, tasselled leather jackets, trucker hats, baseball caps, white sneakers, T-shirts and mullets. Enough has been written on mullets (AKA shortlongs - business in the front, party in the back) that i don’t need to go into it here. Suffice it to say, Oshawa is a place where mullets run rampant. If you are a girl skid, you have the choice of either a mullet, or gigantic country singer hair that makes you look like you stepped out of Dynasty.

Oshawa skids don’t worry too much about getting through school, because dad never did. When he was in grade 10, he dropped out, went down the street and got a job at GM. They paid him enough money to buy his own wheels when he was 16 - a real sweet ride, too. Him and mom got married when he was 20 and she was 18. Then they had me an’ my sissur and bought a house. So i don’t need to take any Mrs. Fielding’s BS or her math homework, MAN. (the sad bit here is that while times change, a skid’s attitude doesn’t … and while the plant has fallen victim to outsourcing and corporate downsizing, skids are only focussed on that solitary prize: good money for a modicum of effort. When they DO finally give Mrs. Fielding the finger and drop out of school, they find they can’t get a job on the line, and then they’re left to the other classic skid pursuits … namely welfare and unwed motherhood.)

An Oshawa skid’s diet consists of chicken wings and crack. They like to drive black Trans Ams or Firebirds, but the damned thing’s up on blocks in my front yard because my brother owes me money for the carburetor he borrowed last summer an’ he never gave it back, an’ he an’ Shelley keep coming around bumming smokes from me and never let me swim in the pool in their complex, so i say screw ‘em. They say blood is watery an’ thick an’ all, but i say you gotta respect the ones you love, and respect is earned. If they don’t respect me, i don’t respect them, you know? That’s how it goes.

i don’t want to come off like an elitist here. You can call me what you wish. But the bottom line is that i was raised adhering to a certain set values from birth to age six - from 1977 to that crucial year, 1983, where my most distant and strangely ingrained memories reside. i was raised to believe that you should treat others as you would be treated. i was raised to believe in an ideal, and i was told that striving toward that ideal was a good thing - a necessary thing. Do i think skids are bad people? Absolutely. i think that the reason they end up like they do is selfishness - this attitude says i’m gonna go out n’ get me what’s mine, and i’m gonna do things the way i want ‘em done, an’ no one’s gonna tell me otherwise. Many of us like Guns n’ Roses for their campiness, but skids make those lyrics into their peronsal manifestos. “Get in the ring, m-effer! Give’r!”

So after that magical peak of consciousness in 1983, we moved to Oshawa, where i learned over the course of 18 years that i was different. That i didn’t belong - that i prized different things and wanted a different lifestyle and abhorred the prevalent attitude of my new hometown. And while the skids of Oshawa made it their personal credo to “Armageddon it,” whatever that means, i made it my life’s mission to do one single life-saving thing.

To get out of Oshawa.

Oshawa is a factory town, in the proud tradition of factory towns. It’s where Colonel Sam McLaughlin decided to plunk Canada’s largest automobile assembly plant in Canada. To this day, GM remains the city’s biggest industry, with (i’m guessing) marijuana grow-ops and Children’s Aid vying for second.

Someone once told me the only reason to come to Oshawa was to make money. The people at GM pay handsomly for human robots to sit on their assembly lines, performing the same repetetive action day in, day out for 40-odd years before they die or go crazy and kill people. It’s like the old joke from the Jetsons, where George’s job is to sit and push one button all day, but it’s real. When some guy who rivets once small piece of a minivan chassis together earns the same amount of money as a starting engineer or an accountant, a certain dangerous mentality brews. It’s the mentality of a grade 10-educated town full of people who think the world owes them something. And they’ve got money, to boot.

But fear not, humble Earth-dweller! This lot is not concerned with buying political influence beyond their paltry borders, or assembling a giant space-ray to annihilate their opposition. No - these beacons of bad cheer choose instead to squander their riches on car stereos and motorcycles. Trans Ams. Black jeans. Satellite dishes. Home theatres. Bottomless Buckets of Crab at Red Lobster. Sexist right-wing newspaper subscriptions. Jerry Bruckheimer DVDs. For Oshawa is not the home of fabled evil-doers or agents of worldwide influence. No no. Oshawa is the home of skids.

So i’m home for Christmas (which i like to pronounce “Chreest-mas,” tho i feel guilty vocally distorting the “Christ” part … but it sounds so damned hilarious) in the city in which i was raised, but never should have been. More on that later if i ever feel like writing about it.

Going home means revisiting The ‘Shwa. It’s a halfway loving nickname for a place called Oshawa, nestled on the North edge of Lake Ontario amongst upper-middle class cities with whom it doesn’t belong, like an adopted child from an questionable home. This bank of cities and township lies East of Toronto, one of Canada’s largest cities, but you can’t quite call them suburbs of Toronto like Long Island is a suburb of New York City. These places are far enough away so as not to be a part of the megacity - just one district apart. And being so far away, ideas catch on slowly here … ideas like reading for pleasure, live theatre as entertainment, and restaurants that don’t exist as chain franchises crammed into bigbox shopping outlets.

Oshawa shares its spot on the lake with sister Whitby (AKA Whiteby), an achingly sprawling labyrinth of oversized homes and not much else, carved into gigantic soulless squares by 4-lane minihighways. Whiteby’s bigger, blacker sister is Pickering (or “Pickherthing,” if you’re ten years old or you’re like me and still find it funny), the (literally) closest thing to a Toronto suburb that the district gets. On the opposite side of Oshawa is its kid sisters Bowmanville (AKA BowMan’s Land, because the place is desolate) and Courtice (AKA nothing, because i can’t think of a clever derogatory nickname), each with its share of older houses and newly minted Barbie Dreamhomes with boutiquey downtown stretches of decorative pillow stores and knick-knack shoppes.

In the midst of all this, playing his Def Leppard albums too loudly and doing hot knives off the stove, is Oshawa.