Tag: travel

it takes one to know one

bOINGbOING: Tales from the Underground Economy

Stayed up late last night talking to a friend down by Savannah. Once I found where he was on Google maps, the soft hint of an accent he’s always had clicked perfectly into place. Deepest, darkest Georgia. I don’t know very much about it, past what I’ve read in books like Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil, but the little red arrow put him directly in the middle of pretty much nothing. Marloe. There was a named road nearby. A road. Singular. One.

I was worried when he went, moving from Seattle, a reasonably sized city, to the far out edge, vaguely near only a college town, even though he’s a perfectly capable human being. He seems to be finding his niche down there, though. Staying with family, driving the long drive into town once a week. I don’t know how he does it. When he went into the DMV to renew his license, he asked where the nearest cash machine was. They told him, down the street, right at the next lights, left at the next street, there’s a place right there. Which sound like reasonable direction until you discover that those lights were two miles away.

I can’t even imagine. I rely on being in a city. Every time I lived somewhere isolated, by distance, time, and/or money, I cracked around the edges. Depression set in, and endless baking. (Beware if I’m ever making continual batches of cookies. It’s my cry for help.) Getting out was like taking a breath, as monumental as the discovery of a new continent. Moving back to Vancouver saved me every time, though at least one relationship didn’t survive. I didn’t feel alive when I was trapped, or sane or healthy or reasonable. My entire world had become the two rooms I lived in, became my perpetual anger at escapism, became awful and vapid and hell.

Funny, going to bed considering that, when my recent trip back east has left me feeling saved again, but this time from Vancouver.

Los Angeles bans new fast food restaurants in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

you must be kidding.. great. that’s just great.

www.readatwork.com

Listening to Christine‘s music in her beautiful St. Denis studio flat, the balcony door open, the sun shining down, I can’t figure out why it’s imperative we leave, and yet we must. Katie‘s wedding is this Saturday, and then October looms, and with it, the need for paying rent. We are quick blooming flowers here, due to vanish any minute. It makes me sad, in a far off sort of way, because I know I’m happier here, it’s far more beautiful, living expenses are seriously cheaper, (rent is how much??!?!??), and yet, I know I’m stuck existing awhile more in Vancouver.

Ah well. Once crisis at a time. As is, possibly only I will be going to the wedding, while David stays behind in Montreal, as Katie’s offer of a place to stay fell through at the very last minute. That way we only have to pay for one ticket, he can stay in the land of light and architecture with my friends who are now his friends as well, and I can brave the unexpected knocking on doors for a couch alone, which should drastically improve my chances. I’ve a proven track record of finding overnight lodging with friendly strangers in Toronto. David, not so much. Then, hypothetically, after the wedding, I come straight back, and we stay in Montreal until it’s time to go down to Toronto for Nuit Blanche, and our inevitable bus-ride home.

It all depends if I can find a place to stay at all. The ticket(s) have to be bought today, and yet, as of this afternoon, we still have nowhere. If, in a few hours, we still haven’t made contact with an available couch, I’m not sure what else we could do, except to split up and reconnect in a few days. Two people stranded in Toronto with luggage is a far more depressing picture than just me alone with an over-night bag.

www.writerhymes.com

oh, to stand tall, to stretch, to dream!

Things I Have Learned On My Summer Autumn Vacation 72 Hour Bus-Trip

  • If the bus contains a man who coughs with the sound of a wet rag being dragged through a dog, he will sit directly behind you.
  • Fresh fruits and vegetables do not exist. All food is fried.
  • All ice-cream parlours in Saskatchewan sell Fireworks.
  • People who Talk To Themselves are likely dangerous. Other good clues are an obsession with silly putty, matching camo-wear clothing and luggage, and unexpected children’s toys.
  • The Rocky Mountain glaciers are almost gone. This is incredibly scary.
  • Small towns contain odd statues of Big Things. They are not good Statues, or even interesting, they are merely odd.
  • Small towns only exist on the prairies as a tangential side-effect of the gravity around granaries.
  • There really is nothing for 50 miles in every direction.
  • Your Time will never be the same Time as when the bus leaves. And, in the same vein, breakfast is regularly at 4:10 in the morning.
  • Calgary smells like cinnamon.
  • Manitoba Bikers have progressed from being people who hit you with crowbars to people who dance to Barbie Girl in A&W parking lots.
  • Trees become exciting half-way across Canada.
  • Winnipeg becomes attractive under the threat of a Bus Strike.
  • Bus drivers are all jolly, except for that one exception to the rule. Even coffee does not help him.
  • Pin-ball machines are perpetually, mysteriously free.
  • Husky Station Restaurants remain the holy grail mecca of truck stop diners.

    • well damn

    Until I double-checked our tickets tonight to see exactly when our stop-overs are, David and I had mistaken our departure for Friday morning, not tomorrow morning.

    Lucky thing I checked. Sort of.

    Now, very suddenly, we only have seven hours to pack and get to the bus station…

    Also, for the record, our stop-overs are:

    Calgary, Sept 18, 10:45 pm
    Regina, Sept 19, 10:30 am
    Winnipeg, Sept 19, 9:40 pm
    Thunder Bay, Sept 20, 7:55 am
    Sudbury, Sept 20, 11:50 pm
    Ottawa, Sept 21, 7:05 am

    We arrive in Montreal Sept 21, at 10:20 am.

    Got friends any of those places, send them down to the bus-station.

    Lung is trying to talk me into being a lap-dancer

    Sam sells Samsung as Ted Brown. My favourite part is that he doesn’t know the slightest thing about football, and his instructions were to ad-lib, so when he told the director, the director wrote a batch of post-it notes of football sounding factoids and stuck them to the green screens for him.

    I love my friends.

    How to Sell Your Uterus, Eggs, Kidney, Liver, Spleen, Plasma, Sperm, Hair & Body for Cash.

    Listening to unreleased Coldplay at work, some follow up thing to the new album, wondering what it’s going to be like traveling across the prairies. I took this trip before, once, a very long time ago, to visit my grandmother in Winnipeg with my father. He bought me a milk carton full of gumballs somewhere half-way through Saskatchewan and made me promise I wouldn’t tell my mother. I bit into them like tiny, hollow, miniature apples in rainbow colours, orange, green, yellow, blue and red. They were white inside and stale, chewy. If I sucked on them, they painted my lips like convenience store make-up. They tasted like childhood, even then, as if I already understood that cheap sugar and heavy dyes are basic ingredients in the manufacture of poor children. Some moments, twenty years later, I can still taste them, the candy flavour echo like sad edges of broken smiles.

    I expect this trip to be more memorable, though perhaps in twenty years it too will only survive as one thematic memory, a single ikon that encapsulates the entire six days in transit.

    when you’re jonesing, you’re jonesing

    Stephen Fry video birthday card to the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project

    Tonight I leave for Seattle, which might not be the most clever thing I’ve ever done, considering that next week we leave for back east, (for which I have barely prepared for), but the ticket is bought, the plans are made, and I can’t help but look forward to it. A group of us are going dancing tonight, there’s ANACHROTECHNOFETISHISM tomorrow, then then Nicole rides into town with her imaginary boyfriend in time for Eliza‘s solo show on Saturday which we plan to follow with a night of sci-geek concertry at the Funhouse.

    Next week, David and I leave for Montreal, (on the same bus as Karen New, coincidentally enough), and make or break our relationship as we travel together, nonstop for two weeks, six days of which will be spent on in transit, knees together, prairies outside. We’ve had a lot to work out since he took off on me at the folk fest, which hurt him more than it did me, and as he finds it significantly more difficult than I do to communicate, my patience has been eroded away, until I can’t bear to bring anything up anymore. I suspect that being trapped together in a bus will be, at least in part, a last ditch attempt to see what intimacy we can bring back from the ashes of his insecurity. Heavy, annoying, and heart-felt, I know.

    Thankfully, there will be little stop overs in Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, and Ottawa! Yay!

    In Calgary, Gavin and Michael might track us down for tea, in Winnipeg, my cousin Francis is going to swing by, and I might be lucky enough to reconnect with Darren in Ottawa. One thing remains, however, does anyone here live in Regina?

    canine: In common usage, a synonym for dog or an adjective meaning of or resembling a dog

    Black Mirror

    Picture this, we’re riding up the I5 at night, the wind in our helmets making the sort of sound that broken headphones might, and around the 300 st. exit, maybe fourty minutes out of Seattle, the gas tank starts reading E. So we pull off the highway, spilling straight into the set of a horror movie, the sort where they kill the back-packing teenagers for buying condoms and booze at the convenience store, one by one, but don’t bother running much to do it.

    Will you admit to seeing House Of Wax? It was like that.

    The gas station we found was closed, empty, though not abandoned. Though it was built, at a guess, sometime in the late seventies, all peeling paint and white wood, and eerie lighting, it seemed oddly updated. Instead of offering coffee, a banner advertised ESPRESSO, and the text on the free standing, four legged marquee next to the street in front offered Chai Tea, $1.79. These touches of modernity weren’t very reassuring in the dark. Rather, they seemed smeared on like fake smiles, as if to put us at ease while out back Jimmy grabs the knife he’s going to slash our tires with.

    happiness is a warm gun

    Brushing this off as a side-effect of mixing heavy pop-culture saturation with the primitive fear of the dark, we stopped. I got off the bike, verified the pumps as new enough to accept credit cards, then Vicki followed suit and we stretched our legs as the bike started filling. Curiosity led me to peer in the windows of the gas station store, to see if the inside felt as left behind by time as the exterior. Sadly, there wasn’t enough narrative in the soil. It only looked like a stereotypical small town corner store, harmless, complete with a comic book rack, crates by the door, aisles of cheap toothpaste and cheaper potato chips. There was no formica counter, no rusty bear traps on the wall – slick give-away posters for soda-pop, juice, and iced-tea bursting from CG water were the only decorations. I turned around, disappointed, to ask Vicki how far we’d come, but then the barking started.

    The sort of barking you hear when you’re running from the law, when you’re tearing through the woods away from the vampires, the werewolves, and the farmer you stole those chickens from. At the other end of that barking lies slavering, teeth, someone with a shotgun, pain, fear, and blood. I’d forgotten dogs are capable of such a massive sound.

    Two of them came out of the darkness, low to the ground, and loud, a large rough collie and a great brown creature that came up to my hip. Get the Hell Out Of Here, they angrily shouted, Get The Hell Out Or We’ll Take Your Leg. Suddenly our Isn’t-This-A-Creepy-Place-Ha-Ha, didn’t seem as amusing. They came closer, barking louder, and I shouted at them, “Hey, Get off. Go.” The collie did, though grudgingly, but the bigger dog, the great brown thing, did not. It only got quieter as it continued to stalk closer, walking towards us in a criss-cross pattern, as if to stay out of reach while it looked into options to circle us.

    Eventually, it came close enough to kick, or claw in the eye. Vicki stayed behind her motorbike, keeping the FJ between her and it, but I was still out in the open, so it came up to me, tail wagging, jaw dropped in a grin, and growling like a sound that came out of the earth. It sniffed at me, continuing to growl, and started budging at my hands, trying to get them out of my pockets. Generally, I’d be more than happy to oblige, (I love ruffling the velvet of doggie ears), but the sound didn’t stop, the growling continued, growing in intensity, so it seemed a friendly gesture full of menace, as if it was hoping to snap fingers off to chew on later.

    Now me, I like dogs. I had a puppy I named, all full of blossoming irony, Spot, when I was little, and I loved that dog like mad. I even like big dogs. Really big dogs. The bigger the better. Dominique and I once saw a dog outside of Uprising Bakery that we both simultaneously mistook for a pony, and my immediate reaction was to go cuddle the damned thing, though it weighed more than both of us together. This dog, however, not so much. It would be a gross overstatement to say it had the spark of hell in its milk chocolate fur, but it wouldn’t be far off to say it had the hate of a righteous preacher in its eyes. We were atheists impinging on the gas station Holy Land, and we needed a killin’. It wanted us dead, or hurt, or maimed, and gone.

    We, of course, were happy to oblige. The dog backed off enough when I shouted at it to edge over to where Vicki was getting the bike ready to go, and when it saw we were both behind a big crazy metal thing, it dropped back off a few paces, still growling a guttural, menacing promise of walking the world with eight fingers, and dropped to the ground to watch us. Vicki was worried that it might have been the sort of dog to chase motorcycles, as some find the sound drives them crazy, but we lucked out. This one only watched, turning its head as we left, roaring out of there as fast as zero to sixty could take us.

    “That was weird.”
    “Oh good, it’s not just me.”
    “Nope. That was a bit scary, Jhayne. It’s not just you.”

    who can feed the cats while I’m gone?

    Vicki and I are leaving on her motorcycle for Seattle tomorrow afternoon. We’ll be staying with Robin, Joseph wants to go dancing, Ivo put dibs on Saturday brunch, MJ’s asked for Saturday afternoon/evening, and Kyle and Trillian have called Sunday afternoon/evening. After that, we’re on the road back home. Pray, my people, it does not rain.