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The very, very good news is that I am engaged to be married to the girl of my dreams, Monika Sawka. After more than five years with someone I love more than I feel comfortable expressing on a blog, one morning in early September I gave her a diamond ring. We were in Hawrelak Park in Edmonton, the city where we met, and the plan is to return there next summer for an August 27th nuptial ceremony with oodles of friends and family.
I am among the luckiest men alive.
Further late-summer adventures included a brief trip to Los Angeles, where the matrimonial theme continued for the wedding of my dear friend Teena Apeles to the man of her dreams. It was a splendid long weekend; I enjoyed it and will in all honesty treasure my memories forever, even the memory of finding myself on L. Ron Hubbard Way!
The company of good friends gathered for a festive occasion is something that gladdens my heart every time.
The other news is that my blog is on hiatus. That all sounds pretentious and stupid, as if somehow the blog had been hard at work all this time! Or as if my blog were cool like Fugazi, and believe me, my blog is not even one iota as cool as they are. But it has entertained me writing this thing, and at least two people have stopped by on occasion to watch the tumbleweeds float by, or to hear me yak on about Karl Marx or some stupid idea I had about something. I will return with my Marxist project, I just do not know when.
I am currently up to my eyeballs in work; over the summer I successfully balanced shit, but now I just can’t anymore. Also, I have been working with increasing dedication on another novel. This here is sort of a sign of what is to come, although believe me, the finished product is going to read very differently from this scrap.
I think I might be able to get back to blogging next summer.
For now, here are some photos from the last few months. They capture a certain moment in time so it seems appropriate to leave them up here for posterity for a while. It is a nice opportunity to leave something positive instead of all my usual grumblings and cynical snarks!
Together the day after the big engagement
Me in L.A. with palm trees
On the road to Mount Mansfield, Vermont
After the kind of week that I would hope not to repeat any time soon, I needed some time to myself. So I hit the road yesterday and went back for a solo hike up Mount Mansfield, Vermont, the same peak that Matt and I conquered last week. The morning border crossing was easy as 1-2-3, as Michael Jackson would have said — if he’d braved the countryside in preference to his oxygen tent, that is — and then it was onwards into verdant and lovely Vermont. I reached the Underhill State Park by 10 a.m. and was on my hike shortly thereafter.
Old codgers slowly making their ascent. "Toot toot, old codgers," I said. "I'm coming through!"
With this climb, the fitness level of North Americans appeared to have bifurcated into two very different streams since just last week: the superfits and the supersloths. I even saw one group of men puffing on cigarettes while they moseyed along amiably. Then there was the woman of approximately forty years of age who was literally running along the trail; her walking poles striking the stony ground with the hectic rhythm of a speed addict on a snare drum.
Reaching the very pinnacle of Mount Mansfield (and realizing that Matt and I had been about 10 minutes short of it last weekend), I found a multitude of daytime amblers relaxing and picnicking, and, in many cases, loud-talking in Quebecois. I wanted to yell “Get off of my mountain!” because like every selfish, hippie nature-lover, I wanted that view to myself.
Oh well, I sighed, let’s see what that long ridge over there is all about. So I progressed along the ridge and discovered that it was primarily the preserve of cheats and sloths who had taken the gondola up to the mountain’s other flank. Here were entire families, grumbling ankle-biters included, who wanted all the glory — but none of the gruellingness — of conquering a mountain. My cynical side enjoyed watching a young girl berating her father. “You promised you’d bring food on our next hike… but you didn’t!” She was prostrate on her side, clutching her torso, as if she were about to die.
Yeah, I took a picture of my smug face at the top of a mountain that took only 90 minutes to climb. Gotta problem with that?
On the descent, there was one moment — one blissful moment — when the trail entirely cleared up, and I stopped, realizing that I could not hear a single word of conversation, nor even a squeak of a hiking boot or the click of a walking pole. In front of me, New England was laid out like a map. There was a profound and total silence. Aahh, that’s more like it. That’s worth its weight in gold. That is, in fact, priceless.
New England landscape, in all her green and rocky and pristine loveliness.
Keepin' it real in Villeray
I’ve never been any place that can rival Montreal for the sheer delight people take in simply being themselves, and Villeray is about the pinnacle of Montreal’s achievement in this regard. At first glance, it’s street after street of brick duplexes and triplexes with the standard winding staircases and rows of maple and Siberian elm and ash trees; very comfortable and completely unpretentious.
You notice just how at home people feel in their streets. They act as if the streets belong to everyone; as if everyone is equally welcome to them. With apparent effortlessness, they enjoy the streets but don’t impede others’ enjoyment.
I still get a kick out of the rough-looking skinny guy who walks up the street with the most exquisite classical music waltzing out from the radio that is either held in his hand or – when he’s not alone – mounted on the back of the wheelchair in which his wife sits, getting pushed along.
I’m a fan of our neighbourhood homeless guy who is always holding the door open for customers at Jean Coutu pharmacy. I think he’s been making money this way for years and years. He has a dodgy leg, a walking stick, a nicotine-stained beard and always a smile on his face.
Today as I walked home from the gym, a boisterous black kid came running down the sidewalk with his arms held out like he was an airplane. He ran a few metres and then turned around and passed me again. He announced this proudly. “I overtook you!” Then his significantly older brother came out of his duplex and walked to his car. “Au revoir, Vincent,” said the little boy to him. “Au revoir, mon petit frère,” said the brother.
On several of the lightposts on the same street, a mysterious message has been taped up – crafted, I think, by a child. It reads (spelling mistakes and all):
Le gorille
Les gorilles ons été menaser en 2008
Une famille d’humain ons adopté une gorille
Lui apprendre à conduire une voiture et autres choses
Les gorilles sont un des plus intelligent des animaux
The Gorilla
The gorillas were under threat in 2008
A human family adopted a gorilla
Taught him to drive a car and other things
Gorillas are among the most intelligent of animals
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Villeray
I enjoy the crazy guy who sits outside his apartment on Drolet and conducts all sides of a conversation, replete with peals of laughter, at high volume. Passersby just smile at him. He smiles right back.
Then there’s the guy who sits two blocks down on Berri, always on his porch, drinking beer, wine, or pastis for hours on end – any time of day except for the very earliest hours of the morning. He seems to know a lot of people. One time somebody passed by and said, “Not drinking yet?” To which the guy replied, “No – it’s still too early.” You can see him there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and he doesn’t even take weekends off.
I marvel at the old women working in the patisserie on Jarry, two blocks west of St. Denis, who will take five minutes to wrap a three-dollar slice of cake, tying on a ribbon and bow unless you explicitly ask them not to. What a company policy – present every slice of cake like a present!
James' cat catches up with some well-deserved shut-eye.
I love the cat who looks like a bigger version of Banchi, sans tail. The cat doesn’t seem perturbed to have no tail. I also really get a kick out of the cats belonging to my neighbours Marie-Ève and James, all three of whom are fat. The white and grey one likes to climb up the stairs to my balcony and stare at Banchi. He used to slip through my open window and take a nap on my couch or on my bed, but I put a stop to that. Now I leave the window open just a sliver; a waif like Banchi can get through but old fatty can’t! I think that made him cross for a while but now he just accepts it. Just a few minutes ago he was asleep on the balcony with Banchi a few feet away keeping watch over the Villeray alleyway. There’s always something interesting going on there, whether it’s just the breeze rustling the grass, or bumble bees like Zeppelins coming into land, or the neighbours across the way coming out to sun themselves, or children hurtling past on bike or on foot, yelling and laughing.
Three hours south of Montreal by car is Black Mountain, the tallest of the Adirondack Mountains overlooking Lake George. I arrived there yesterday at 10 a.m., parked at the trailhead and embarked on the Black Mountain trail loop, a walk of seven miles. The initial climb through the woods gets steeper and steeper until you burst into the blazing light of a midsummer day and you can see the enormity of the landscape stretching into the distance. The lake is 2000 feet fellow, etched with the white trails of boats, whose movement at first glance is imperceptible; further afield, you see the mountains of Vermont – each successive ridge turned ever more shadowy by the haze of humidity.
At the peak of Black Mountain, a hundred or more dragonflies are dancing on gentle eddies of wind. There is a now disused fire ranger’s tower, adding about another 20 feet to the mountain. It looks like an oil derrick. Did that tiny grey cabin made of wood at one time serve as the ranger’s living quarters? Beside the tower is a much newer addition – a wind turbine. As the breeze ebbs and flows, the turbine’s blades make either a loud slapping sound or turn quiet and sometimes even stop silent.
On the way down there are a few ponds – Black Mountain Pond, Round Pond, and Lapland Pond – as well as patches of marsh, a couple of old wooden bridges, and the reassuring plastic trail markers hammered into the trees at regular intervals. At one point those markers ran out; I spent about 20 minutes by one of the ponds wondering where on earth my trail was supposed to go next. Fortunately there were two young men fishing from a boat in the pond who were able to tell me I’d made the wrong turn about a quarter mile previously and I’d need to go back there and take a different trail. I did this and found the rest of the way unaided.
A particular highlight of the descent was an encounter with a lizard. He/she was merely an inch and a half in length, ambling along as if on a Sunday stroll. My presence was, happily, no cause for alarm. The lizard stopped for a breather and we contemplated each other’s respective existences for a couple of minutes.
By two in the afternoon I had returned to my car. Many more hikers were parked there than in the morning and I didn’t envy them because they’d picked the hottest time for the climb. It must have been over 30 degrees, and very humid. During my walk I had drunk one and a half litres of water – everything I had – and could easily have drunk more.
I took zero photos. Had my camera but the batteries were dead. Typical me. I don’t care. It was pretty much unforgettable with or without photos.
William James.
Over here there is a short article about American psychologist and philosopher William James’ wanderings in the Adirondacks over a century ago. He tackled Mount Marcy, which is 5,343 feet to Black Mountain’s 2,646 feet. At the time, James was reportedly seeking a brief reprieve from academic life. He was about to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh, with which, according to the article “he hoped to cement his reputation — and that of American philosophy — and demonstrate his belief that the psychological and philosophical study of religion should focus on the direct personal experience of numinousness…”
That night, after summiting Mount Marcy, he could not sleep, and he went outdoors and looked at the stars and the moon, and had – you know – one of those moments that only Nature can provide. After that “he understood spiritual reality not as a concept, or as something privileged, but as an unexceptional property of human consciousness and a fact of life.”
I’ve not read a single page of William James (but I sure like The Turn of the Screw by his equally famous brother, Henry!), nevertheless, this is one of those nuggets of revelation that stands out like an epigram to me, from which in my quintessentially pretentious way I can find all sorts of meanings for my own life.
Whenever I spend months and months – even years now – living apart from any sort of experience of the sublime, something troubling is going on in the soul, but I find I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is until I’m there again, on Black Mountain, experiencing things that are not just sublime but surprising (who knew there’d be a small swarm of dragonflies; who knew lizards don’t always run away) and I become aware that no matter what I’ve learned over the years, my mind still labours in predictable ways, and its labours become burdensome to me. Only that assault on my senses (and I mean assault non-violently) achieved by Nature can wrench me out of the trap of my own self.
What if the spiritual really were “unexceptional” and a “fact of life”? What if it were just as important and as central to my existence as breakfast cereal, my apartment, and a day in the office? Leftists like me have a highly ambivalent relationship with spirituality – despising the bigotry and cruelty seen too often in dogma, and equally reviling New Age mysticism, and hugging trees and similar bullshit – and so often spirituality seems like something to phase out of life altogether, or to just be indifferent about. But what if I could be seeking something that is not some affirmation of myself – “I am one with the tree, hence a more advanced being” – nor a prescribed moral code, per se – but rather the oxygen of outside forces? I knew in my soul yesterday that I needed to go up Black Mountain alone; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Talking and reading and writing – which I do all my goddam life! – are sometimes so tiresome. You find yourself predicting your own next sentence sometimes. And the Metro is predictable, even when it breaks down, and the city streets in their grid constantly corral us left and right. All of these things are well and good – we need them – but speaking only personally here, I still end up feeling trapped. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the countryside. Whatever spirituality is, surely there is an aspect to it that resides only at the tops of mountains or in the vastness of oceans, and defies comprehension. And that is exactly what is so freeing. At the top of Black Mountain, here is something I do not have to understand, I do not have to solve; I do not even have to converse with it.
No wonder there is a fellow who chose to be buried there. A wooden sign tells passersby that Black Mountain is where his heart belongs.
Banchi and I are morose. She misses hunting in the backyard and I miss Monika, who is gone for three months.
Rain on weekends sucks. I wanted to play soccer today. Instead, I am looking at this:
I bought my lucky bamboo from the Jean Coutu on Jarry and Lajeunesse in July 2008. That sets a personal record: this is the longest I have ever kept a plant alive.
So maybe it doesn't look 100% healthy, but it has looked this way for over a year, so I reckon it'll be OK
My winning strategy is that any time my lucky bamboo looks like it might shrivel up from neglect, I water it. I take it to the kitchen sink faucet, fill it up, and return it to the shelf where it lives. Am I superstitious about my lucky bamboo? I am not really sure where I stand on this score. I have had a lot of good and bad luck since buying it, but on balance, I think it has served me OK.
At the time of my lucky bamboo purchase, my apartment was nearly empty. I moved from Edmonton to Montreal with only a large backpack, a few blankets and sheets, a suitcase of clothes, and an old laptop. I cohabitated in Verdun for a year, then moved here alone to Villeray. The first few weeks in this apartment for my silent bamboo and me were mostly uneventful. I slept on a camper bed in the middle of my empty bedroom. I slowly tried to assemble some sort of home without increasing my debt too too much. My aim was to make the place seem welcoming for when Monika finally joined me in Montreal. I got a queen bed, a kitchen table, curtains — fancy stuff like that.
As busyness, stress, and pecuniary problems subsequently conspired against me, my apartment stopped getting any more home-like. After a brief bed bug scare, I threw out my camper bed and the couch that I had inherited when moving in. I fumigated the living room. Then I purchased a new couch for $260 from some crooks on rue Saint Hubert. I say crooks because the couch broke about a month later. But I still use it. I pile up a bunch of scrap wood underneath the middle crossbeam. Every now and then, this pile of wood collapses and the couch lurches downwards violently. Typically this happens while Monika is over. She finds it hysterically funny.
My dwellings are probably not much different from those of your average grad student.
Recently, the shelf for my spices, on which the lucky bamboo resides, enjoyed a thorough cleaning. This is thanks to the only civilizing influence in my life – Monika, again. Now the plant strikes a more confident pose against the white wall. I watered it today; long life seems built into its DNA, but I am doing my part, I am convinced of it.
Some debate has occurred in these parts as to whether it’s actually possible to kill a lucky bamboo. I contend that it is, which makes my feat of keeping one alive all the more impressive. I have met people who HAVE killed a lucky bamboo. Unfortunately, I cannot remember their names, which does not help me in the heat of debate.
Sadly, besides keeping alive a lucky bamboo, in all other respects, I do not have green thumbs. I cannot garden and I don’t know the first thing about the all the millions of photosynthesizing organisms on this planet. My cousin and his wife know a lot about these matters, as you’ll see on their blog. I envy them.
How is it that I can be told the name of a tree or flower several times and always end up forgetting it and yet I only need to be told the capital of Mongolia ONCE and it sticks forever? (It’s Ulan Bator.) What accounts for this selective memory? Could it be that I excel in the show-offy recollection of facts that only help out in conversations with like-minded friends? (“You know, the USA reached peak oil production in 1970 and has been in inexorable decline ever since.”)
Like many who share my leftist, apocalyptic, vaguely communitarian leanings, I am better at talk than deeds. My inability to garden is but one symptom of my condition. Gardening is a form of practical knowledge. My BA in Political Science can’t exactly be called practical knowledge.
As our economy shows ever more signs of entering terminal decline, my inability to procure any of my basic needs by dint of my own labour brings me increasing regret. I truly look forward to spending more time in a genuine and productive relationship with the natural world one day. Perhaps this is the dewy-eyed viewpoint of an out-of-touch city slicker, but I think that eating tomatoes from my own garden would be something of a spiritual rebirth for me. I was born and raised in the country; a return of some kind to more earthy endeavours would bring me considerable contentment.
Many of the material trappings of the city do deep damage to my soul, I am convinced of it. Billboards and bar room TVs and traffic jams and laptops, iPods, cellphones everywhere – these make me uneasy and anxious. Nothing has made me happier in recent years than being in the middle of the mountains in France with Monika, hearing nothing but each other and the wind.
I am not pining to be out of the city, of course, because Montreal is a wonderful place to be at nearly times. What I need is balance; a bit less city, a bit more green. Until I find that balance, the lucky bamboo will have to suffice.
This week I had the pleasure of spending four days in our province’s capital city, Quebec. It was delightful. Quebec City is arguably the prettiest city in Canada. I especially like walking down from the splendours of the old city and getting up close to the St-Lawrence in the lower city, which is every bit as historic as the upper town.
Quebec City, lower town
View of Quebec City from my hotel room
Quebec City, upper town, flags!
A square in the lower town, the name of which eludes me. But the church is pretty, no?
As of March 1, I will be working full-time in communications at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of McGill. I am delighted to join their team and will endeavor to live up to the incredible reputation McGill has enjoyed lo these hundreds of years, well, I think about 180, actually. This is probably the last I write about the job because it’s a policy of mine to not mix blogging and business, unless, of course, it’s to write enthusiastic reviews of Porte Parole plays.
In my free time I will continue to do whatever I can to support Porte Parole, a theatre company whose mandate I profoundly believe in.
2010 really is off to a wonderful start so far.
McGill University. Image from Creative Commons
I don’t have much enlightening to say about the iPad. But Hugh McGuire over here does. A great blog post, and the comments that follow are equally enlightening. Me, I just watch as another gadget that I can’t afford is released onto the market, joining the company of numerous other products sporting the ubiquitous “i” including the iPhone, the iPod, the iTouch. Sigh.
What I do own, chiefly because it was a business write-off, is a Fujitsu laptop with an “e” key that my cat broke off three months ago. Banchi, you little rogue! My Fujitsu is the computer I use for the Interweb. I also have an IBM Thinkpad from the year 2001, which does not have the Interweb, but it does have a functional keyboard. A very handy thing for a writer!
Steve Jobs is pretty much a celebrity. Isn’t he? It’s perhaps fair to say that anyone with something expensive to sell probably fits the modern-day definition of a celebrity.
***
Of words.
If asked what is my favourite word, I would probably say Yak. It makes my girlfriend laugh whenever I say it. In one’s repertoire, it pays to have a few trademark words to throw around that easily accomplish one’s humour goals.
Not surprisingly, Yak rhymes with Mac. Mere coincidence? I think not! Words ending in AK-sounds clearly contain great power. I am convinced of it. As an aside, the iMac is the kind of computer I will own day own. I am committed to realizing this dream.
Because I’m a greedy brat who still pines to get his hands on loot at Yuletide season.
La Grosse Femme d’à Coté, Michel Tremblay
Limits to Capital, David Harvey
The boom and the bubble, Robert Brenner
Bonheur d’occasion, Gabrielle Roy
The Museum of Useless Efforts, Cristina Peri Rossi
