Introduction

Welcome to Sharbear and Alon's e-zine! We didn't decide on a particular theme, and if it turns out like we have one, it's completely accidental. We have a random collection of ours, along with our friends' writing. Brace yourself for a barrage of entertaining writing in the form of poems, short stories, editorials, memoirs, and satires. We hope that you enjoy this site as much as, or even possibly more than we enjoyed making it. So, ENJOY!
-Alon Givaty

Memoirs

All you need to do is stretch the slightest bit further. You are nearly there. You think to yourself “I wish I could be taller, why did my parents give me these useless genetics”. Just a little bit further…Then you step back down and gaze up to where you want to go. That thick, wooden branch is two arm distances away. So with all your energy, force, and power you jump. You got it. You are hanging from the branch. Now what? Before your hands start to slide off, you position your feet against the trunk and embark on lugging yourself up. While sitting on that first branch, you feel excellent. You accomplished the hardest part. The entire way up the tree, from now on is effortless.
That is what happened to me when I climbed my first tree. From then on I loved climbing trees. Every single tree in my backyard I would be in, or have already climbed. So I would start climbing the trees in the neighbors lawns. I began to read books in trees and bluntly became obsessed.
The firsts for everything is exciting, thrilling and a new experience. You learn from what you have done, and only become better. I’m talking about the “firsts” that you choose to do. Not the kind like getting your first speeding ticket because that is out of your control. (Other than you pushing the gas pedal a little bit too hard.) A first thing we remember. It is imprinted in our brains because we have that uncertain, uncomfortable, and unstable feeling. We don’t know what we are doing, but try it out anyway. Once the excitement runs out, the first has been overused we move on to something more intense. This works for drugs as well. Once the typical “druggy” has smoked enough weed, then they move on to harder drugs like coke. Or shrooms, the types that would give them a different type of high, also known as: a new experience.
Once you are comfortable with driving a car, you begin to speed, try sharper turns, reverse all the way down the street or pull the hand brake in the winter. Once you learn how to read, you begin to read longer book, books with difficult vocabulary and words you might not understand, you read more books per week and so on. In everything in life, we progress. From our first experience that we remember we will always learn and better from it. That is why it is so important not to regret. We learn. We grow, and people do change.
By: Sharon Lazarow

Satire

By definition, satire is, "a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.". To paraphrase, it basically means a piece of writing which makes fun of some sort of human error. Interestingly enough, a synonym for the word "satire" is irony. They're not entirely synonymous, but irony can be used when writing a satire.
-Alon Givaty



Life

People want to live. People don’t know what there is after this life. People take life seriously. To every person in this life, it is the same thing over and over again. Get a good education, so you can get a good job and get paid well, so you can live your life well. By the time you are done with everything, including your job, you are at least fifty - sixty years old. And what can you do when you’re 60 compared to what you could’ve done when you were 16? Life is weird. People take it too seriously, following all these rules made up by no one. Why? Because they want a good life so that by the time they die even if they don’t get to go to a nice place like heaven, they’ve lived a good life. But what IS a good life? Wasting fifty years of your life to study, work and “contribute to society”, or actually enjoy your life as you go along and what happens, happens?
I say neither.

-George Buziashvili
Edited by: Alon Givaty

Short Stories

Finder’s Keepers

Everyday a new item gets placed in the lost and found. They loose it and I find it. Whatever comes in I usually pocket and replace it with my own junk. I’ve got cameras, wallets clothing, you name it I’ve found it. I find the odd set of keys but never the car to go with them. All the things I find are usually pretty useless, but one day I found something worth my while. I found a backpack full of cocaine and a gun. It was obvious that this bag belonged to a drug dealer. I later discovered that the front pocket contained ten thousand dollars.

I made the wise choice of quitting my job and becoming a drug dealer because I had millions in cocaine and a nice ten thousand dollars to tide me over for the time being. I was only twenty-seven so I made up an excuse that I won a small lottery in Canada and was retiring. It wasn’t the best excuse but it seemed better than I found a shit load of coke and a gun so I’m going to deal.

Half a year in and my sales were going great. I had made $500,000 and still had half the bag of coke left. It was only worth a million total so my calculation of millions was a little off. One day, I received a phone call from a guy who said he got my number from a friend and knew that I was dealing coke. I thought nothing of it so I agreed and told him to stop by my house tonight.

That night he arrived at my house to pick it up and I invited him in. I told him to make himself at home while I went into my room to grab the coke. I pulled the bag out to scale him out a quarter when I discovered a small wallet hidden in a secret compartment of the bag. I wondered how I could have missed this before. I took out the wallet and opened it to see that it had another $500 cash. It was my lucky day. I then took out the driver’s license and took a long hard look at it. My heart began to race as I realized the person’s ID I was holding belonged to the man making himself at home in my living room. This was his bag, his coke, and his gun. He must have talked to the people at the TTC lost and found. They must have told him I quit because I won the lottery. I bet he knew then and there I had the bag. I should have thought of a better excuse. I then tucked the revolver into my pants and proceeded to the living room like nothing was wrong.

When I got to the living room he was standing in the middle of the room holding a shotgun. He told me to give him the rest of the cocaine and all the money I had made off of it. I handed it over with no fuss. As he started walking toward the door to leave, I pulled out the revolver and shot him in the back of he head. He must have forgotten about the revolver he lost too. Finder’s keepers.

-Curtis Reed
Edited by: Sharon Lazarow


“Oh my God! Watch –“
That was the last thing I had heard before I got hit. A young man in the prime of my life, got hit by a truck. My whole life ahead of me; halfway through University. Girlfriend, job, family. Life was great.
One stupid mistake took it all away.
So here I am, dead. The afterlife isn’t what I’d hoped it would be. I’m just a lost soul, floating around in space. Is this forever? Is it temporary? Does time even exist? How long have I been here? A minute? A year? A lifetime?
I’m lost. There must be other souls around here somewhere. I try to yell, “Hello, is anybody there?” but forget that I have no voice.
No body.
Nobody.
Nothing.
I am floating around in nothingness…
Blank.
Blank.
Blank.
Wait, I see a light. It’s just like I’ve been hearing about my whole life.
The light.
I drift towards it.
“Ryan! Ryan! Oh my God, you’re awake!”
Crap.
I was this close from going to heaven.

-Alon Givaty


Richard Wilson is a millionaire

The British Columbia marijuana growing industry generates about $6 billion per year in hard currency profits. This allows people like Richard Wilson, a 29 year old University of British Columbia drop out, and those above him to amass personal fortunes and political power. Everyone gets a piece of the marijuana cultivation money-pie. Hardware stores, car dealerships, electricians, real estate agents, police officers, money launderers, attorneys, bankers, and retail stores. You name it. Some police officers grow, sell, and smoke pot. Prosecutors and judges do too. Technicians who work for BC Hydro, the main electricity supplier, often help growers get enough electricity in ways that won't be detected by BC Hydro's partnership with anti-marijuana police, who seek to identify grow ops based on unusually high energy consumption. And at the top of the food chain, people take a million a year in profit, without running the risk of getting busted or doing the hard work of keeping crops alive. The industry doesn't run on trust, good intentions or so-called "marijuana consciousness." It runs on one mutual interest: to make as much money as possible, as soon as possible, with as little risk as possible. In the high-stakes world of commercial growing, smart people like Richard Wilson are professionally paranoid. The people who purchased the house and pay property taxes on it are not Mr. Wilson or his associates, they are a faint investment group with fictitious identities, complex real estate paperwork, dummy investors, puppet people, and foreign bank accounts. If the grow house is ever busted, it won't matter how hard investigators work to find its real owners. The real owners of the house and the people who helped them obtain ownership of it, will never be identified, and, even if identified, will probably never be caught, punished, or have their assets seized. Canadian police know this, and they don't try so hard to bust big grows, which is one reason that growing in Canada is still much safer than growing in the US. When you drive around Vancouver, you can bet that every fourth or fifth house has a grow op inside. Just ask Richie Wilson.
-Robert Crenson
Edited By: Sharon Lazarow

Editorials

No More Age of Majority!

Eighteen-year-olds rejoice! You can legally [almost] do whatever you want. You know why? Because in Canada, you are legally considered an adult! But wait, there's more! Do you know what you did to sanction yourself as an adult? You pretty much just turned eighteen on your birthday. I bet you feel special. But so what? Are you ready? Probably not. What I'm trying to say here is that everyone matures at a different rate, so two people who are chronologically eighteen may not be there psychologically. Come on people! Our government assumes everyone matures at the same level, and we trust these guys to run our country! When we turn eighteen, with Canada being a democracy and all, we get to vote. The fate of our country - the decision of our future leader - is in our hands. There are eighteen-year-olds in high school. I dare you to round up a bunch of 'young adults' and see how many of them are actually prepared, or willing to vote. Fortunately or unfortunately for us, we can choose our leaders, but not [necessarily] our children. And children grow up. Fast. Think of it this way: our kids can drive at sixteen. Sixteen-year-olds are in grade ten or eleven. Sixteen-year-olds are concerned about partying, and trends, and maybe school. Nineteen-year-olds are allowed to drink. Nineteen-year-olds are focused on pretty much the same stuff. So why do we get to drive before we drink? Because we can't drink before we drive! Get it? But really, I was in a car accident with my friend and her drunken father. Guess who was driving? Guess who was drinking? Guess who was not sixteen, or eighteen, or nineteen, but fifty-two?! My friend's immature father. Right! Good job! Please tell me why we are allowed to decide the fate of a country before we can consume alcohol. I can't quite seem to figure it out. My suggestion is instead of just considering someone a legal adult because they turn eighteen, there should be a written test - ON ETHICS - issued to eighteen-year-olds. You don't pass a course if you don't do the work. You don't get dessert if you don't eat dinner. You can't drive just because you turn sixteen - you need a license. The same should go for 'adults', because an eighteen-year-old is not a grown up.

-Alissa Rothman
Edited by: Alon Givaty

Poetry

All writing is a form of expression, but poetry is the most soulful and revealing of all. By definition, it is, "the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts." This definition puts to many unnecessary restrictions on poetry. Poetry that isn't beautiful, imaginative, or elevated, is still poetry. Poetry is anything that is written from the "heart".
-Alon Givaty

Birds were chirping.
My girlfriend was screaming,
My heart was hurting.

It was a fateful day,
Three years ago.
All I had to say,
Was I'm not ready, no.

Sparky and I,
Walked off alone.
Tears in my eye,
Wish I was a stone.

-Alon Givaty

I can’t write a poem

To make it good, it needs to rhyme

But that takes up too much of my time

I think so hard about some nonsense

The words are not evolving from my conscious

One quarter of the page, two more to fill

I’ll send you a blank page, please mail me the bill

I’m cold. I’m tired. I want to sleep

Once I hit the pillow, I won’t wake till that beep

A poem is not my forte

A journal? That’s easy. Hooray!

Meditation music sets the mood

Don’t disturb me, don’t be rude

When can this infinite torture be over?

Mr. Leprechaun, bring me a four leaf clover

Good grades and high marks

I don’t give a friggin fart

Slap me too smarten up, someone please

I want success without the lazy disease

Trying and almost does not exist

Just do it right, with a strong held fist

The time has come, this appears complete

Buckle in to the adventurous life seat

The journey is for you to enjoy

Talk to you later, my friend, my boy

-Sharon Lazarow