When I told Anita Clarke that I’m going to spend the summer flying kites with local bloggers, artists and various people of interest, she told me that she had a kite. But not just any kite. A fancy stunt kite. Mine was a cheap, owl-shaped creation.

Which one would work better? We went to High Park to settle the issue.

Having purchased a bag of pepperoni sticks from a local deli, we found a decent place to run our experiment. Anita’s love of spicy pepperoni is mirrored by her love of everything else. She’s the sort of women who gnaws life off, chews it up and digests it. You can guess what happens next.

If you can’t, let’s just say that she proves my argument that anyone can learn to write except “writers.” And Anita learned to write just a couple of years ago. Not so she could sit in cafes sipping coffee but because she actually had something to say about a subject that interests her. You know, for the wrong reasons.

Since she started she has, while working a real job, constantly covered fashion for BlogTO and dashed off articles for Gloss Magazine and Chick Lit. She’s been interviewed for print and television. Her own blog, “I Want–I Got” receives something like 40,000 visitors a month.

So it’s no surprise that she’s well known in the Toronto Fashion scene. What may be a surprise is that I’m well known to her. In spite of her love of athletics, we’ve been good friends for years. She’s one of the few people in my life that I’ve allowed over the wall and into the trusted zone. And she’s one of the even fewer people who didn’t run screaming from the mayhem or have the dogs set on them once locked inside.

But Anita has never scared easy. If she did, it would have happened the first time we met. I can’t remember much about the night, having drank roughly $300 worth of Guinness in a Mexican restaurant, but she tells me that we discussed George Orwell and that I was wearing a tie. She said that she had never seen someone so drunk talking about books. That sounds somewhat plausible. I am a windbag.

But all of that was a long time ago. Today, we had a kite debate to settle.

This is nothing new. Our whole friendship is best characterized as a never-ending argument, which occasionally pauses in the agreement that people are horrible and someone should just nuke the whole mess. But even that starts another round of fighting as she believes venture capitalists should inherit the world while I want the robots to be in charge. It’s not humans so much as organic life that I object to.

And High Park is full of the stuff. I would have much preferred the clean simplicity of a parking lot to muddy, oozing nature but they won’t allow you to fly kites in parking lots. So beset by ants and flys, we assembled our kites. With some difficulty.

Although Anita works in computers, she seemed to have a great deal of trouble getting her kite off the ground. She was quick to blame me and my poor technique in helping her launch. “No, don’t hold it like that!” When I followed her instructions and the kite still failed, her wrath turned to nature itself: “It’s not windy enough!”

But it was certainly windy enough for me to launch her kite straight into a tree. That’s her fault. She knows damn well that I never play fair when winning is at stake.

We managed to get it out of the tree intact. Unfortunately, her strings, like her knickers, were in a twist.

Some neighborhood children gathered to watch this self-described “techy nerd with a passion for fashion” become totally undone by two sets of string. She made snarky comments about their clothing until they left in tears. When I tried to defend them by saying they were only kids, I was told that age was no excuse.

Looking at their eccentric headwear, I was forced to agree.

Changing the subject, I gently suggested that she try my kite, which was, by this time, named Grumpy. This met with much more success.

Grumpy took to the air and taught us about the dangers of kite flying. It would often plummet straight down — hard and fast– at our heads. We both spent of good deal of time ducking and swearing, running about and burning our fingers on the string. In spite of all this, we both got a few good turns out of the contraption.

Then disaster struck.

As payback for my earlier attack, Anita launched Grumpy straight into a nearby tree. No problem, I thought. I haven’t climbed a tree in years but it’s much like falling off a bike. You never forget how. I yanked my body onto this despicable, organic creature, still half- dead from winter, and shook its skeleton-like branches.

A couple of nearby women, sunbathing in bikinis, cackled at the spectacle of me up a tree. So I did the only thing possible. I took off my pants and made lewd suggestions. That silenced them and briefly involved the police.

But, working together, Anita and I managed to free the kite. We proved once and for all that teamwork never fails. Well, we almost proved it. Our efforts actually destroyed the kite. So I don’t know what we proved.

And Grumpy now lives in a garbage can.

Still, as beat-up as my kite was, I still have to give it the day. At least it took to the air, which is more than certain fancy, stunt kites can say. Of course, those kites could just say that they’re still alive. So Grumpy won the battle but lost the war.

What else is new?