I’m posting again as I find doing this somewhat cathartic. Some true Darin stories, tame ones cuz this is a family place…

- a long time ago, we were probably 18 or so, Darin, eager to get to our regular haunt of Room 215 - Kap Inn for a major round of indulgence, barged into the Ayora Easter dinner in progress, right in the middle of the appetizers, which happened to be escargots au beurre d’ail. “You guys eat slugs??!!” he blurted out. “well, I can go back home and lift up a few boards in the backyard if you need any more…” Classic.

- then there was the time I called Darin’s mom to happily confirm I was indeed going to be on the same Toronto bound train as Darin for March break madness. I quote from Sheila, pretty well verbatim…“Jesus H Christ!…that’s all I need, you two on the same goddang train. Just make sure he doesn’t pee on some old lady’s head.” I am happy to confirm that never happened, he didn’t have chance to, he was pretty well lights out by the time we got to North Bay and I have the pictures to prove it. We poured him into a cab when we hit Union in the morning and sent him off to his Uncle to come around. We ended up at the Gasworks and Nickelodeon that night and that’s another story…

- in the later years we got a scare out of Darin, when he had a heart attack during Xmas holidays, about 5 years ago I think. Darin’s devil may care attitude was full on, and he made it down for my Superbowl party in Toronto at the end of January, heart stents in place. His sense of dark humour took over and he immediately attempted to take full advantage of his new found “handicap”…“hey Ayora, get me a beer, I had a heart attack you know”…the next day we needed to get some breakfast into us and made our way to the uppity restaurant down the street, all of us looking like bags of crap. Darin ordered the massively rich salmon Eggs Benedict with super duty hollandaise sauce and when it arrived at the table, his nonchalant bravado reared its head and he took a picture of it and emailed to his wife Nicole. …“it’s low cal Nicky” he said, or something to that effect. oy vey…

- every time I came to Kap on my annual pilgrimage I stayed at Darin’s. This went on for years but after a while I figured they were getting tired of me showing up, cleaning out their fridge, soiling their linen, and generally being a pain in the butt. (they weren’t, but that was my perception) So I decided to buy a place in Harty, a stones throw away from Darin’s via the back roads. Since then, Darin constantly backhanded me with…“Ayora, you’re not even from Val-Rita, you’re from Harty man”…ah, hilarious. Sigh, we were supposed to be the Dukes of Hazzard…well, we got one run in, the second last night I saw him alive on this planet. We did a run in his Yamaha side by side he was so proud of, from his place to mine, through the backroads, and we foiled the cops one more time. We had such a good time that night, with Nicky as Texas Hold Em master dealer, and a gang of regulars, we howled all night…

- my last entry speaks to the respect Darin’s intelligence garnered… A few years ago I was entertaining the idea of starting up my own graphics outfit and called on Darin for advice as to being incorporated, limited etc and the advantages/disadvantages of each set up. He sent me an email, fully, completely spelling things out. However, being an “artist pothead” (as Darin labelled me) I was somewhat befuddled. I was seeing my cousin that day, whose husband happened to be a very prominent Toronto lawyer, a man who has participated in writing laws for this country, a man extremely well versed in all things business and legal. He didn’t know Darin from Adam but took a look at the email printout of what Darin had sent me. He began reading it and simply said “I like this guy”…then proceeded to read further and exclaimed “I really like this guy!”…and there it is. I retold the story to Darin, how impressed my cousin’s husband was with his advice to me and Darin was just beaming, that really meant a lot to him…such an intelligent, helpful cat Darin was. He was my go to guy on all matter of things. heavy sigh…cathartic, yeah well, I dunno about that…