During a recent dinner with friends, a little comment I made in passing prompted someone to ask me about my dislike for French Canadians.

It goes back to the spring of 1998. I was in a little town in southeast Ireland called Killarney. My goal was to take a break from London for a few days, touring the country by bicycle during the day, and getting royally shitfaced with the locals at night. The most important detail of the plan was to relax and enjoy myself. It was a simple and straightforward goal. The sort of thing that could only go wrong if a bumbling group of neolithic wanktards arrived to ruin it all (<- that's called "foreshadowing").

I arrived in Killarney by train from Dublin around midday and checked myself in at a youth hostel that went by the name of "The Sea Charm." Or something like that.

"The Sea Snake." "The Sea Bass." "The Sea Louse."

I don't remember anymore. It was something vaguely nautical, anyway. The name doesn't even matter since it said so little about the place. From what I remember, it really should have been called "The Easiest Way to Get a Communicable Disease While Visiting Beautiful Killarney," but it wasn't called that, probably because it would have made people not want to stay there as much. But I don't know. Marketing isn't really my thing.

So, like I said, I checked myself in at the hostel. I was then promptly led to my room by a stereotypically short and cheery Irish person. She wasted no time pointing out the various facilities and then went on to inform me what time they usually served Animal Organ Pie in those parts, which was a bit of information I immediately let go of on account of the fact that if God had really intended for me to eat kidneys, he would have given me the ability to make animals explode with my mind in such a way that their various inner-bits would be strewn around a field for easy collection.

But he didn't, so I don't eat kidneys.

The Irish woman left me alone, and I heaved my travel pack onto one of the twelve beds in the room.

I used to love being the first to arrive in an empty hostel room. You never knew who else would come walking through the door. That day, I was sincerely hoping that the Irish Hot Nymphomaniac College Girl Support Group would be meeting in Killarney for their annual retreat, that there would be eleven of them, and that I'd have to sacrifice my personal space so that they could have a place to bed down for the night (or do whatever it is that the girls of the IHNCGSG did in rooms with beds in the evenings, which was not something I was going to linger on for any period of time since I am, if nothing else, a gentleman).

While I was busy not pondering the nocturnal activities of the IHNCGSG, the door to the room opened, and in walked my new roommates. I was a little disappointed at first, but that was only because I was still not fantasizing about a night with uncontrollable nymphs. With a few more seconds to snap out of my head and come back to reality, that initial little bit of disappointment sprouted into the full-blown horror that it should have been when the door first opened.

For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was still in Killarney. It seemed to me that I had just been dropped in the middle of a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. I expected to see a mastodon come charging through the doorway, and then shortly thereafter to experience the sensation of several spears creating new holes in my body as the strange beings before me sent me to an early death simply because I was clean shaven.

There were five of them. From the size and quantity of bags they were carrying, I guessed that they were a nomadic people who had crossed some frozen land bridge or another to make their way over to Ireland in search of better hunting grounds after theirs dried up. Four of them were males, while one of them was something else. They all had dark, straight hair down to their asses, and they carried with them their own weather system composed of airborne scum particles and the stench of decomposition. They shared one large eyebrow between them. It ran like a thick hedge of dark mold across the pronounced ridges of their sloping, ski-jump foreheads.

Having gone as far as they could (the walls of the room prevented them from walking any further (several minutes of painful thumping confirmed this)), they claimed their beds, dropped their bags, and all simultaneously started grunting. It was like five Chewbaccas had just checked in for the town wookie conference.

One of them looked at me with his beady eyes, recessed several inches back into his skull, and barked something at one of his friends. I couldn't understand him, but I had an idea of what he was saying.

"What do you think, Ugh? Can we eat it?"

"Looks scrawny. Let's wait until nightfall. While he is asleep, we can poke his body with sticks to find the tender bits. We might collect enough meat to feed one of the younglings."

"Good thinking, Ugh."

"Thanks. I have these ideas because my forehead doesn't slope quite as steeply as yours, so I have at least the rudimentary beginnings of a frontal lobe, allowing me the luxury of foresight and planning."

And so on.

It was at this point that I decided to walk across the room, calmly open the door, and then run like hell down to the front desk.

I asked about my new roommates. I was told they were from Montreal.

Oh, really. I looked around the room, wondering if anybody else had heard. I thought I might get a few knowing looks from my fellow homo-sapiens. The sort of look that says, "Oh, yeah. A guy from Montreal ate my brother. I know what they can be like."

It didn’t happen. All around me, unaware of the circumstances, people read tourist pamphlets and ate yogurt like there was nothing wrong – like it was perfectly all right for a bunch of French Canadians to come barging into a hostel with suspiciously primitive craniums.

I was suddenly ashamed of myself. I was looking for confirmation in my budding dislike of all things French Canadian. Somewhere, on the other side of the Atlantic, there were, like, thousands of other French Canadians (there might be more, but I don't really know) who were probably nice, normal people who didn't eat their roommates. I thanked the woman at the desk for the information and went back to my room.

I sat down on my bed and resolved to like these... people. Whatever our differences, whether it be a language or hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, there was no reason we couldn't hang out and party in Killarney together. I mean, cavepeople probably liked beer, too.

But that's when It happened.

One of them reached into a duffel bag and produced what looked like a twelve gallon jar of peanut butter.

They had been traveling around with this gigantic thing of peanut butter, and they had no lid for it. All my warm thoughts about inter-species social outings went cold. They were savages through and through.

The jar was placed on the floor, and my caveroommates gathered around it. They regarded it with a reverence that made me think Jesus Christ himself might rise from the jar and start spouting winning lotto numbers while setting off bottle rockets and farting the Star Spangled Banner.

Instead, a couple of them stuck their hands in the jar, dipped their fingers in the peanut butter, brought the peanut butter out of the jar, and then licked it off.

This seemed like an appropriate time to take my leave. I went away for the rest of the day, and I had a wonderful time bicycling and drinking.

When I woke up the next morning, they were all still soundly asleep in their bunks, probably suffering from peanut butter finger-licking hangovers. I headed down to the kitchen to help myself to some foody things.

When I was wrapping up, one of my French Canadian roommates stumbled into the kitchen, gave it the "What is the purpose of this place?" once-over, and then fiddled with pots and pans for a while. He looked upon the cooking utensils with the same curiosity and skepticism that a Frenchman might direct at a bar of soap.

The device that seemed to trouble him the most was a cast-iron skillet. He held it in his right hand and inspected it from every angle. He cautiously tested its limits while occasionally sneering. It reminded me of the scene in 2001 when the monkey-people spotted the monolith and tried to figure out if it was Friend or Foe.

Finally, he lifted a finger to the skillet, extended it, and slowly scratched the surface, thinking perhaps that it might finally reveal its secrets if he tortured it in this way. His movement was completely exploratory. There was never once a look of recognition across his face. The skillet was as alien to him as the Viking landers might have been to a couple Martian microbes.

That's when I realized that there would never be an understanding between the French Canadians and Rory Blyth. As long as they insisted on transporting open jars of peanut butter across the world while misunderstanding innocent skillets, there could be no peace.

In the meantime, however, we should isolate the French bits of Canada and turn them into wildlife preserves where we can watch and study these interesting humanoids as they progress along their own evolutionary ladder.

One rung at a time.

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