While travelling in the eastern US and Canada this summer, I only had my point-and-shoot, and no mini-USB to transfer the images to my laptop. In Asia, I had the DSLR, but no laptop. Thus, I was unable to post any photos. Now that I am back in Vancouver, here are a few to catch up. Click thumbnails for larger image.

In Concord, Massachusetts, I went to see what Thoreau saw. The bath house is, of course, a new addition at Walden Pond:

Also in Concord, Thoreau’s grave. There’s a larger family stone with all the full names and dates, and this small marker on HDs actual pile:

The good burghers of Concord apparently saw fit to memorialise the road they paved over the weir of the indigenous fishers they vanquished, if not the fishers themselves:

On to the commune. Here’s the view of the middle pond, from the lodge house. If you squint you can see white-tailed deer in the water:

The lodge itself, centre. To the right is the temple; to the left, the guest house:

The desk in my cabin. It faced south, toward the pond and was very bright. I didn’t do a lot of writing in it, since there was no power, but it was a great place to wake up:

A side trip to Vermont:

One of the great things about the commune is the casual dress code. Here I am doing dishes:

By the time I got to New York City at the end of July, I was getting a little grizzly, though I fit right in while watching HAIR in Central Park the night before. This was taken on the Hudson, with Jersey in the background:

On to Asia…

Singapore was the first stop. This image appears on a map of Fort Canning Park, a lush historical site downtown. Chewing gum may be forbidden in Singapore, but apparently public sodomy is just fine:

The next stop was Ko Samui in Thailand, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. This photo is at Big Buddha Beach, where we stayed. The clouds look threatening, but it was actually sunny most of the time:

Here’s Larissa at Zazen, our favourite restaurant in Samui. Or at least, our favourite rich, white tourist restaurant. Food was good, but I especially liked the little cubbyholes built into the wall outside, looking onto the beach. Nice and quiet:

Here’s a restaurant we didn’t try, the Mr. Poo Barbecue (a rather unfortunate transliteration of Mr. Phu):

The ferry dock at Big Buddha Beach:

The beach was very nice, and great for swimming, but an unfortunate amount of trash marred it in areas, such as this Fanta can, which had become an intertidal condo:

I have yet to identify this somewhat common bird. This one was seen in Angthong Marine Park:

Angthong Marine Park is an archipelago at which we hiked, kayaked and snorkeled. Here are some of the many small islands:

Next stop was Bangkok, but just for one night. Our room at the Shanghai Inn looked a bit like the Hollywood version of a Chinese bordello. Despite being in the middle of a human and automotive jungle, it was remarkably quiet.

Bangkok is astoundingly crowded and noisy (at least, compared to Singapore), but I loved it, even if I did have to duck into a cafe occasionally to desensitize:

A sample of the electrical work:

Not all streets were a maddening crush. This passage in Chinatown was comparatively sedate, and check out those paving stones:

On the way home I stopped in Korea to see my cousin, Jennie for a few days. She toured me all over Seoul, despite being six months pregnant, and her husband Kevin filled me with meat and Soju. By the time I left, Jennie and I had similar waistlines:

Those Koreans love their signs. Most of the urban areas I saw were built very densely, with lots of apartment buildings instead of sprawling suburbs, and at night they glow with neon and other lighting:

I’d say more, but I’m jetlagged. Off to bed.

I arrived in Singapore on July 28 - my first trip across the date line, and my first journey to Asia - where I met up with Larissa, who was attending a symposium on electronic arts.

Singapore has a reputation for being a pretty rigid place, where gum chewing is against the law. From my brief visit, it didn’t seem so bad. I only saw one cop in the four days I was there and he wasn’t caning anyone for jaywalking. As I understand it, most of the dictatorial power of the state is applied to discouraging opposition to those in control of the government. This has apparently been quite successful, as the same party has been in charge since 1959.

Although we had done no planning ahead of time, we’d intended to take a vacation while in the region. After considering Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Laos, we settled on Thailand, and flew to the island of Koh Samui on August 1, where we checked into a small, middle-brow resort called The Secret Garden.

I was excited about visiting Asia for the first time, though now that I am here I am less excited about it. Samui, which once consisted of a bunch of fishing villages, is pretty much one big resort where the locals cater to the tourists in standard colonial fashion. Every town is comprised half of resorts, one quarter bars and restaurants, and one quarter tailors who make clothes cheap that bear labels of big designers, like BOSS and Armani. What sort of person would have so little self-esteem to buy an ‘Armani’ suit in Thailand and seriously add it to his closet, I don’t know. If you aren’t rich enough to buy the real thing, it just seems white trashy to try to fake it. Kind of like a labourer putting plaster lions on the fenceposts of his 33 foot lot in East Vancouver. Oh well, to each his own.

I am also disappointed by the amount of garbage on the beaches. I’m not sure it originates directly from tourists, or from poor disposal infrastructure. On the other hand, it seems generally safe here.

I did not bring my laptop on this trip, so I am using Larissa’s MacBook, which I am finding a challenge. Linux has spoiled me. I cannot even figure out how to resize an image or start an FTP client, so there will be no photos uploaded until after I get home.

On Monday, we’ll be flying to Bangkok for one night (where the world’s our oyster), and then returning to Singapore for another night. From there, Larissa will head for Toronto, via Vancouver, and I’m off to Korea, to visit my cousin Jennie for a couple of days in Seoul. Back to YVR on the 16th, the Aeroplan gods willing.

Here I sit in La Guardia airport, where I’ve been for the last six hours waiting for Air Canada to come up with an idle 767 to clear the surplus bodies abandoned after a couple of flights were cancelled this morning due to thunderstorms. La Guardia was apparently named “greatest airport in the world” (quotes not mine, LL) in 1960, but in 2008, it leaves a bit to be desired. Specifically, services. The only place after security that sells hot tea is sold out, and anyone looking to drink themselves silly to combat the boredom is out of luck, too. The universe (ie: Robert Milton) willing, I’ll be out of here by 5:30 tonight.

This wraps up part one of my summer vacation. I left my friends at the commune on Monday and made my way to Manhattan with Tim. On Tuesday, were got up at 5:30 am and cycled to Central Park to sit in line outside the Delacorte Theatre to wait for the scheduled distribution of free tickets to the 41st anniversary opening of HAIR. Seven hours on a blanket in Central Park was infinitely more pleasant than the same at La Guardia, and we got the tickets we sought. They even turned out to be great tickets. The show was great - with the Central Park setting, it was like being in the 60s again. And how oddly relevant it all seems, once again.

Also on Thursday, Tim took me out to a few Chelsea galleries. Most memorable were pieces by Zhang Huan at the PaceWildenstein Galleries. I have since discovered that there is an exhibit of some of Huan’s work at the VAG right now, so I’ll have to check that out too.

Wednesday night, after a day of cycling in Manhattan and dinner at an Indian restaurant, another sort of culture: Mamma Mia (the film, not the play). We’d read an amusingly critical review in the New York Times, and decided to give it a go. It was, as the review promised, awful but entertaining. I suspect that it might be an ideal candidate for viewing under the influence of mood altering substances.

I should be back in Vancouver late tonight, unless Air Canada abandons me in Toronto for the night. I’ll not have time for much more than re-packing, though, as I’ll be off to Singapore on Sunday.

Before I left Boston on June 22, I decided to take the subway over to Cambridge to see a film, at a theatre largely surrounded in M.I.T. buildings. The film was Aleksandra, by Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov. I’d already seen two other films by Sokurov: Russian Ark, a dialogue-light, quasi-documentary historical fiction, of sorts, filmed in a single take in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and Moloch, a similarly light-on-dialogue depiction of Hitler and Eva Braun - taking a relaxing break from the stresses of executing the holocaust - in the company of Josef Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Both films were at times somewhat evocative of watching grass grow, or paint dry, but were at the same time quite compelling, creating the awkward combined senses of restlessness and fascination.

Aleksandra, in comparison, was almost fast-paced. The film portrays the journey of an old woman who travels by military boxcar to Chechnya to visit her grandson, an officer in a Russian camp near a Chechen village. While there, she walks into the village and interacts with several Chechens, including an old woman who lives in a bombed out apartment building. The physical and psychological condition of the Chechens, particularly (?) of the young men, and the stagnating lives of both the Chechens and the Russian soldiers, provides a necessary but non-proselityzing anti-war message.

I also traipsed through several sections of the Museum of Fine Arts, at which the current major exhibit was “El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III”. I’d also intended to get to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but I learned long ago not to overdo the museum circuit or exhaustion soon sets in, so I left it for a future visit.

Boston seemed a pleasant enough place to visit. Lots of interesting art and architecture, busy, safe, clean streets, and a great, reliable transit system (and cheap: a one week pass for just $15. Hello, Translink…?!). Something wasn’t quite right for me, though. It’s the people. It’s unfair to judge a whole population based only on the observations of a short-term tourist, but things seem a bit Disney-esque for my liking. Not enough rough edges.

Often, when I was regularly travelling on business, I would ask the concierge where the “funky” part of town could be found. Usually he or she would hem and haw a bit before pointing me toward a mall or a multiplex theatre. “No, no”, I would say, “Funky. You know, where the queers and hippies hang out”. Usually I would get a blank stare at best. The hippie pool has been vastly diluted since the 70s, and in most places like Boston, the queers (now generally referred to as the LGBTs, in keeping with the greater societal trend to reduce pretty much everything to an acronym for easier marketing) long ago diverged from their counter-cultural roots and are now in the suburbs painting their picket fences nice colours that complement the soft tones of their minivans. Of course, New York and San Francisco may be the only places left in North America with even a shred funkiness, but even they are waning fast. I ambled into one gay bar in South Boston to find a flock of what I imagine to be Log Cabin Republicans standing around looking at baseball and CNN on the television monitors, not a whiff of sexual tension in the air, nor anything more colourful on the menu than Bud Light. Oh well. Onward I will be dragged (or not), kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.

I arrived at the commune at Easton Mountain in time for dinner on the 22nd and set myself up in a nice little cabin on the banks of the middle pond. The cabin is only about twelve feet square, and has no power or water, but it has a dozen screened windows, all of which I keep open. (I’d post a photo, but I brought the wrong sized USB cable. Curse you and your inconsistent digital standards, Nikon Corp!). I lay in my bed at night listening to a symphony of crickets, bullfrogs, tree frogs and barred owls creating fine music, conducted by thousands of fireflies that animate the forest. My mission while I am here, besides helping run the programs that support the community, is to spend a part of each morning writing, with the objective of compiling a wholly unedited novel-length draft that I might use at a later date. It’s taken me a week to actually get my sleep cycle into an early rising model, but I’m finally getting to where I want to be. I’m a little behind on the word count, but am making progress nonetheless. Quality over quantity.

I came here without a firm date for departure, but I have since established one. I will stay here until July 20 or 21, at which point I’ll be catching a ride to New York City. I’ll have a couple of days there to socialise, and if ticketing works out, catch a live performance of Hair in Central Park. On the 24th, I fly out of La Guardia to Vancouver, but I’ll only be hanging around for two days. Then, on the 27th, I fly to Singapore to meet Larissa. We’ll take a little trip in (possibly) Malaysia. On the 13th of August, I fly to Seoul, Korea to hang out with Jennie for a couple of days, and then continue on, reaching Vancouver again on August 16, just in time for the last of Wreck Beach season.

I stayed on in Fredericton a couple of days longer than intended, for I was having a pleasant time. My hosts were very generous and took me to St. John on Saturday, followed by a trip to St. Andrew on Sunday. I spent Monday sorting out my gear and repackaging it all, and on Tuesday jumped on a bus to Bangor, Maine.

Yes, bus. My knees are clearly unprepared to push the weight of me, my gear and my bike down the coast and over the mountains to New York. I seem to have no problem cycling long distances with less weight, but loaded for living on the road, the pain starts. Perhaps it’s age, or some injury from last year. The pain seemed to have started while cycling to Whistler last summer. If it doesn’t get better, I may have to consider a future of travelling with just a bike and a credit card.

At any rate, a day of bus riding landed me in Boston on Tuesday night, shortly before midnight and shortly after the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship. I checked in to my hostel and listened to screaming and honking until at least 3:00am.

I don’t really get professional sport. Actually, I don’t get it at all. Marx referred to religion as the “opium of the people”, and I’m inclined to agree with him in some respects. But at least the kind of spiritual inquiry that leads some to religion, however irrational a form it takes, may be a rational response to a natural instinct. Sport, however, seems more a legitimate opiate. W.P. Kinsella’s semi-seductive allusions to a spiritual component to baseball notwithstanding, sport seems entirely devoid of progressive humanism, liberal charity, or intellectual challenge.

Imagine, for a moment, if everyone cheered on their local Wal-Mart store. Each fiscal year would be the start of a new season. People would start pools in their offices in the hopes of correctly guessing the quarterly sales results. Children would collect Wal-Mart cards that bear photographs of store managers and sales stats. Grown men would walk about town in over sized jerseys emblazoned with the name of their favourite “cashier of the month”. Families would attach flags bearing the face of Sam Walton to the windows of their minivans. It would all come to climax when one of the empire’s many stores would be named Sales Leader of the Year, and drunken revelry in the streets would ensue.

But that’s ridiculous. The working classes allowing themselves to be sedated into cheering on a for-profit corporation that’s competing against other for-profit corporations, with the benefits of public tax subsidies, is absurd. Forget I mentioned it.

Anyway, back to Boston. Wednesday I went out to Cambridge and walked around the campus of Harvard, and while there visited the Fogg Art Museum. In the evening I went to Chinatown for dinner, but coming from Vancouver, was mildly disappointed.

Today, I ventured out in late morning to find that pretty much the whole population of the greater Boston area (about 4.5 million) were mingling downtown celebrating the victory of the “world champion” Celtics. How a team in a league that includes the word “national” can be considered champions of the world, I’m uncertain, but I’ll try to avoid devolving into another anti-sport rant. On a whim, I decided to get out of town, and I jumped on a commuter train to Concord, about an hour away.

Concord is, of course, the location of Walden Pond, the lake along which Thoreau built his little cabin (on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson), where he resided in partial solitude over two years writing what would become one of my favourite books. As I anticipated, there is little solitude to be found at Walden Pond on a hot June day in 2008. The parking lot was jammed and the water full, but I managed to find a semi-quiet rock on the far side of the pond on which to contemplate a more objective understanding of the appeal of basketball. I fear I’ve failed.

Afterward, I took a stroll through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where I was able to gaze upon the graves of Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Alcott, absorbing literary spirit. Perhaps I’ll put some of it to practical use in the next few weeks at the commune in New York, toward which I will be travelling on Sunday.

—–
Although I’m trying to do a little freelance editing while I travel, I’m enjoying the opportunity to do a little more reading along the way too. I just finished Chaim Potok’s Davita’s Harp, and am now working on Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights.

I have entered, for the first time in my life, the Atlantic time zone, having arrived in Fredericton, New Brunswick on Wednesday morning. The trip was uneventful. I spent so much time and energy packing my bike in one box and my panniers in another – making sure that the weights and dimensions were not in excess of Air Canada’s continually shrinking limits – that I was almost (but not quite) disappointed that no one at the airport even bothered to weigh or measure them. Fear not, however - I was not left without anything about which to complain: my pre-ordered (and pre-paid) meal never showed up at my seat. Of course, “meal” is a bit of an over-enthusiastic description for what would probably have turned out to be a tasteless Quizno’s something-or-other and a tiny packet of crisps, the combined volume of which probably would not have exceeded the total packaging surrounding them, so perhaps I should be grateful. I did not suffer for lack, however, as Larissa had taken me to a very pleasing and filling French dinner before departure that warded off hunger all the way to Fredericton.

I even have something positive to say about Air Canada. Really! It’s not simply jet-lag induced delirium. There is a small screen in each seat, and a selection of films. As usual, there are a number of schlocky Hollywood titles available, none of which I cared to see even a trailer for. An unexpected additional option, however, includes four French films, with English subtitles. I was able to sit back in my window seat and enjoy a choice (”Un Secret“) from my favourite genre: the Holocaust. And you wonder why I’m so dark.

Fredericton, I am happy to report, is not dark. It is sunny and, most importantly, warm. Hot, even. It’s been a tad chill in Vancouver recently, and any temperature over 12 degrees would be a welcome change, but I was able to enjoy cycling into town from the airport in highly satisfying 24 degree comfort. It’s not all bliss, though. As I sat on the front lawn of Fredericton’s tiny-but-pleasant airport re-assembling my bicycle, the local mosquitoes relieved me of no small amount of blood.

So here I am, travelling once again. I’m not sure if this cycling thing is going to work out, or if my knees will collapse along the way somewhere, but I am hoping that the new bike will make the difference between pain and pleasure. The plan (such as it is) is to spend a few days in Fredericton visiting Darren and Brian, and then to cycle in an as-yet non-specific south-easterly direction. I intend to arrive at Easton Mountain (the ‘commune’ in New York that I stayed at last summer) by June 24. If the knees don’t work out, I’ll send the bike home and take the bus.

Last night, Darren, Brian and I attended the award ceremony for the 2008 Strathbutler award, given to a visual artist by the Sheila Hugh McKay Foundation at the Fredericton Playhouse Theatre. This was preceded by a gala private cocktail reception in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. One oddity was the bar at the gallery where, when I asked for red wine, I was told by the bartender that dark beverages are not available in the gallery. “I guess a Guinness is out of the question?”, I asked. He laughed as he poured my white wine, but I never did get further explanation. An Acadian tradition?

As ceremonies of this sort go, it was pretty good. It was well organised and stuck to its already compact schedule. As well, a short welcoming speech by New Brunswick’s Lieutenant-Governor Herménégilde Chiasson was the most intelligent and passionate defense of the arts I have ever heard from a colonial representative of the queen (though that is perhaps an unfair description, as he is more accomplished and respected artist and intellect than regal mouthpiece).

The weather continues to be hot and sunny, though there is the possibility of rain forecast for the weekend. Today, I will be out cycling on the north ’shore’ of the St John River, testing my knee before I decide whether to venture across the Appalachians under full pack.

I spent the past weekend at a ranch, fifteen kilometres south-east of Spences Bridge, that belongs to a couple of gentleman farmers of my acquaintance. The ranch, a small orchard operation, is a peach-shaped property near a sharp bend in the Nicola River, a tributary of the Thompson, which in turn feeds the Fraser, the little brown stream that rushes westward through the province to settle itself in the briny blue-green of Georgia Strait.

On Sunday, the dawn sky was clear and the temperature began to rise. By 9:00 am I was laying naked on the cedar deck, tea in hand, ears tuned to the Yellow-rumped Warblers, genitals pointed due east into the warming morning sun. After a long, dark, cold winter, it was a welcome tonic.

After gaining my traditional spring burn, I spent part of the afternoon clearing brush. Very presidential. Actually, the brush was fallen trees. I cut the branches and trunks into nice stove-length sections, a somewhat unnecessary detail as there is no wood stove here, but my Ruskin training is deeply ingrained.

There’s a lot to be said for a little self-directed, manual labour. I had an electric chainsaw, but I used it only on the pieces I could not break by hand, or by snapping them across my knee. Many would assume that it would be faster to cut it all with the saw, but I doubt that’s true. Really, people usually prefer a saw as it requires less actual effort. But a little effort is something more of us could use once in a while, and I’d rather snap branches than pay for the privilege of lifting iron discs in a gym.

By avoiding the saw, I was also better able to enjoy one of the reasons why I came up here in the first place: the sounds of silence. Over the noise of the saw I can’t hear the calls of warblers, the cries of ospreys, the buzz of insects, the continuous babble of the river as it stumbles over rocks and itself, the wind as it meanders through the valley, or even the planet as it vibrates its way through its orbit. The awareness of such things is so easy to forget in the city, where the hubbub distracts us from so many of the sounds that connect us to our origins.

Even now, as I sit in a coffee shop in Vancouver’s west side remembering this, an espresso steamer is trying to out-screech both a coffee grinder and a small child, and something the locals refer to as “music” is hammering away at my fleeting connection to the distant sounds that feed my soul. Alas.

The spot in which I was doing the actual cutting was directly adjacent to the meditation hut. One of the ranchers rises early in the morning each day in order to meditate in this hut. It’s a pleasant room, sparsely decorated and smelling of incense, and I imagine that it provides him with a good deal of satisfaction and serenity. I respect his practise, but it’s not really something that works very well for me. I could sit in the hut for weeks and wouldn’t gain a fraction as much serenity as I did snapping birch branches in peace for an hour or two. My meditation comes in the form of mindful activity. It’s not enough to simply contemplate the unhewn log. I must interact with it, even (or perhaps especially) without overly focussing on it.

I often find such satisfaction in laborious, solitary activity. When I was young and my opportunities for independent journeys were limited, I found solace in such things as cutting the lawn in summer, and shovelling the sidewalks, driveways, and sometimes even streets during the winter. These days, without a lawn or a snowy climate, it’s usually washing dishes that satisfies this need. Not quite the same physical benefit, but my nails are generally cleaner.

I’ve just returned from a quick trip to San Francisco, a week by the bay, where I was satisfyingly warmed by the California sun after months of (relative) freezing in Vancouver. Either I’m getting old and soft, or spending much of last winter in Costa Rica has removed my usual winter hardiness. Or both. Whatever. San Franciscans didn’t seem to feel quite as comfortable as I, however, as they all seemed to be running around in toques and scarves while I was running around in shorts and a t-shirt (or at times, considerably less).

I flew to San Francisco, and as is frequently mentioned in this blog - ad infinitum - I find modern air travel almost irritating enough to just stay home. It’s difficult to say whether my objections are explicity about air travel, or about capitalism generally, for the effects of capitalism are as ever-present in an airport as they are in any suburban strip mall. Or worse. Let’s take, for example, my stop at the Seatte’s Best Coffee outlet in Sea-Tac airport. I ordered a cup of tea and a toasted bagel with cream cheese, not having had an opportunity to enjoy a hearty breakfast before catching my bus at a distinctly unholy hour of the pre-sunrise morning.

Allow me a brief, irrelevant digression on the topic of ordering tea in America. Such a thing is often a challenge, as waiters usually respond to such a request by dropping their arms, and often their jaws (and once, her menu), and exclaiming loudly with wide-eyed incredulity, “Hot Tea?”. Say this to yourself aloud, but with extraordinary emphasis on the word “hot”, preferably with a slight uvular fricative and you’ll be on the right track.

Anyway, I had a choice of two bagel types: plain tasteless plastic, or sesame-coated tasteless plastic, with a tiny thimble of flavourless cheese. They don’t, of course, spread the cheese for you. Instead they give you a plastic container of cheese that has been refrigerated at a temperature of zero degrees Kelvin and is as firm as a TSA agent’s insistence that you remove your shoes at security, despite the fact that you bought the kind with the plastic last that won’t set off the metal detector.

As this is a post-9/11 airport, you are required to spread your cream cheese with a plastic knife, even though the cheese is hard enough to warrant spreading with a good, sturdy pair of box cutters. Not only is the knife plastic, but it is individually wrapped in a plastic sleeve in order to protect you from any bacteria that might have attached itself to the knife during it’s manufacture in the third world. What I want to know is, where was the plastic sleeve made? I have to touch the sleeve to remove it, thereby contaminating my hands, hands that will ultimately need to grip the presumably sterile knife firmly in order to spread the cheese. If the Al Qaida publicists want to foment panic in middle America, they need only announce that they’ve infiltrated the plastic sleeve manufacturing plant and convinced workers not to wash their hands before returning from the washroom.

I’d been invited down to California by my friend Paul, whom I met at a nudist gathering last year in Pennsylvania, in order to participate in the Hunky Jesus contest, a segment of the annual Easter gathering of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Dolores Park. Although I was virtually beardless and had recently, mistakenly, had the rear portion of my flowing locks shorn in a failed experiment in follicular fashion management, it sounded like fun, and travelling, even just for a week, was just the pick-me-up I needed. Check out my Flickr page for event photos, if interested.

The contest was loaded with potential hunky Jesuses (or whatever the plural is of the One True God), competing for a prize of $100. Clearly, they go to this effort for the fun, not the money. Here’s a shot of me with Paul (left) and the winner, Kaleb, aka “Michaelangelo’s Jesus”:

I spent several evenings hanging out with Paul, of course, and also managed to get out to San Jose to visit Garry and Pedja, whom I have not seen in a startling number of years, since they decamped Canada for warmer climes and nursing school. As Garry was largely responsible for my first foray into deity impersonation, circa 1995, it was a timely reunion. They took me out for a drive on the coast highway north of Santa Cruz. Here are Garry and Pedja, at the Pigeon Point lighthouse:

While in SF, I also managed the usual visit to City Lights, hung out in various cafes, and visited the Gilbert & George exhibit at the De Young museum. Here’s an example of their work, titled Winter Tongue Fuck:

“Why does Scrooge love Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
Because every buck is dear to him”. — Unknown

As is well known among those who have long felt an inexplicable desire to suffer my company during the darker months, I am not an enthusiast of the holiday in which we are currently immersed. I don’t erect a tree, I don’t hang lights in my windows, I think eggnog a vile substance unsuited to human consumption regardless of the quantity of rum with which one dilutes it, and I have largely recovered from the social guilt that in the past has compelled me to prepare and mail to my friends and acquaintances the pulped remains of the boreal forest. (Evidently, I have not yet abandoned a propensity for lengthy sentences. Welcome to my Henry James Christmas story.)

This year, however, I fear that I may be having some sort of mental breakdown: I’m feeling unusually charitable.

I’m not especially fond of clothes shopping, so I generally leave it until it becomes a necessity. As misfortune would have it, my last pair of 501s decided to burst apart (no, not in the chilly California sand) five days before Christmas. As I said, I don’t shop very willingly, and I certainly don’t set foot anywhere near a store or mall after Halloween for fear of encountering horrors such as the Backstreet Boys Christmas Album playing on an endless cycle. They say that suicides increase at this time of year, and after my experience working in a mall a number of years ago, I’m convinced that these are largely comprised of retail workers pushed beyond the limits of aural human endurance. Waterboarding has nothing on Celine Dion wailing Adeste Fideles.

Not surprisingly, it was with some apprehension that I set out to buy more jeans on the evening of the darkest night. As solstice rituals go, mine seemed ill-advised. I’d rather have been dancing around an evergreen, clad only in ivy and toasting the moon with a hogshead of the blood of the sacred grape, but it was either now, or January, for I’d sooner stroll about Vancouver naked than set foot in a store during ‘Boxing Week’, and I kind of wanted the trousers earlier rather than later.

I began to sense that something was amiss at the bank, where I held the door for someone behind me and – get this – smiled. Then, waiting for a red light to change (an out of character incident in itself) on Howe Street, I found myself making smiley-faces at a pram-bound infant gawking at me with wide-eyed interest, until his or her presumed parent caught me and I was forced to hurriedly turn my head to check the status of the walk signal.

I went to The Bay, for not only can I get into it without entering the evil mall, I know which door to enter that doesn’t require either that I walk through the cologne section or have to use an escalator to get to the Levi’s section. As luck would have it, the 21st turned out to be one of only 362 days in the calendar year that The Bay gives out Scratch and Save cards, and spending less on clothes is for me second in popularity only to wearing none of them at all. As I was there anyway, I decided to buy three pairs of pants, and some socks (spending roughly 20% of my 2007 income, I might add, somewhat proudly). Naturally, I was also given what surely must be my 17th Bay credit card in order to enjoy an additional ten percent off of my purchases. You’d think they’d eventually clue in and stop giving me these cards, as when they eventually arrive in the mail, I cut them up and toss them, never to be used. Visa is everywhere I want to be.

I must digress briefly on the subject of Scratch and Save. There are three possible discount amounts to scratch: 30, 40, or 50 percent. I’ve always suspected that cards providing fifty percent are severely limited, if any exist at all. As I was mindlessly scratching my card to reveal the predicted 30%, the woman behind me engaged the cashier in a discussion of the topic. He said to her, “We departments all compete to see who gets the 50%”. Characteristically silent until this point, I burst forth with almost a shout, “Aha!”. Beaming in victory, I turned to the woman behind me and said “You’ll notice that he said the 50%.” Everyone in line had a good laugh at this.

Picture it. There I was, standing in a long line at a cashier in a department store, buying clothes, four days before bloody Christmas, and engaging in jocularity with my fellow Gomorrahns.

I swear, during the whole journey from home to store to home, I didn’t once scowl at a soul, or mutter under my breath, with Tourette-like articulation, about the third-world schlock with which we purport to honour ‘our’ christ. In fact, on the way home I stopped at a bookstore for a couple of novels, and afterward I was a block away from the store before I realised that I was humming I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.

Now, I’ve been having some unusual dreams lately, but I don’t recall any with Sim-like characters dragging me unwillingly through traumas past, present and future. Most of my dreams have been more satisfyingly Bacchanalian in theme than reminiscent of Ezeqielian repentance. (Is that a word, or is my attempt at classical metaphor ridiculous?).

Perhaps my apparent conversion from Christmas-sceptical grump to, well, Christmas-sceptical sorta-cheerful, is less a vision-induced submission to something about which I am inherently and decidedly unenthusiastic, and more a result of just having been to a few more fun, satisfying and highly social seasonal parties this year than usual. Or maybe I am actually undergoing some sort of fundamental conversion, the culmination of which is yet to be known. As I once said, “I think I’ve done just about everything I said I’d never do”. So who knows? I do, however, remain sceptical.

To all my friends, a Happy Solstice!

For the past week, I have been suffering from flu-like conditions that I apparently picked up secondhand from the current consort of my roommate. Such misery! My throat feels like ground glass when I cough or sneeze - not an infrequent occurrence - and I have plenty of aches of the head, neck, shoulders and, at times, the teeth. My nose is rubbed raw from blowing it and there is a disconcerting presence of phosphorescent liquids. More than you care to know, perhaps, but I’m sure it paints a picture of the discomfort.

Unpleasant as it is, though, one must remember that at any given time, someone, somewhere, is suffering more grandly. What better way to put one’s pain in perspective than to pay some heed to someone else’s suffering? With this thought in mind, I went to visit the Globe and Mail to see what tragedy might be unfolding toward which can focus my blurry vision.

There on the front page was a photo of Stephen Harper. This didn’t help. For the first time during my illness, I felt nauseous, as I always do when the words “Prime”, “Minister” and “Harper” are combined into a single, spirit-dampening triactor of unfortunate phraseology. The accompanying article contained text that showed the words “Harper” and “Mulroney” in the same sentence. In my rich fantasy life, I often think of Harper and Mulroney in a single sentence, but usually the fantasy includes a cell in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines shared with “Mom” Boucher, with “Mom” taking more of a “Dad” role after lights out. But this isn’t the way that I meant to make myself feel better. Let’s move on.

It was the mention of Brian Mulroney that got me on track for feeling mildly empathetic. Not for Mulroney himself, of course. It’s Mulroney’s “spokesman”, Luc Lavoie, the guy that has to stand up and publicly proclaim the depth of Mulroney’s innocence and the peerless extent of the great man’s unquestionable virtue. Maybe it pays well, but what a shitty job!

I’ve been contemplating a return to the workforce of late, which means that I’m actually going to have to go out and do a little self-marketing, something I never enjoy and therefore find it a difficult activity to embark upon. In my darker moments, I sometimes fear that, in some sort of perverse path-of-no-resistance, I’ll end up being employed as the counter boy at the New York Fries outlet in The Mall. Have you ever been there?

Many years ago, I was a shoe salesman in the previously mentioned mall, an occupation that I despised thoroughly. Whenever I was feeling like I could sink no lower than to be on my knees stuffing a size nine foot into a size six shoe while trying not to look up the skirt that was splayed open before me, I would take a walk down to the food fair and watch the pimply-faced kid behind the counter, shaking the grease off the potatoes for probably less than minimum wage. He’d dump them in a paper bag, collect some money, and turn back to make more, all while a frumpy middle-aged manager yelled at him if he stopped moving for a second. And then I would go back to the shoe store, feeling a just little less miserable.

But I think I’d rather work in the fry shop than be Luc Lavoie. The poor bastard!