Tag: travel

five bottles of things going wrong

Heisenberg, Goedel, and Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg says, “From the fact that we are all here I can infer that this is a joke, but cannot determine whether or not the joke is funny.” Goedel says, “No, we can’t tell if the joke is funny because we’re inside it, if we could observe ourselves from outside, we would know.” and Chomsky just shakes his head sadly. “No, no,” he says, “The joke is funny. You’re just telling it wrong.”

Language source root map.

Crossing the park outside the train station to buy our tickets back east tonight, the night smells like dark, warm grass and marijuana under the broken lights. A man on a park bench to my right sings a snatch of song as I pass, though with a falsetto woman’s voice, sweet, light, as if they were secretly a ten year old girl in a ratty disguise of fourty years of hard drinking. Inside the train station, I don’t see David, who’s to meet me here. The building is mostly empty, the sort of vast space which hushes conversation, forces everyone to talk a little quieter as if our voices might be swallowed by the square footage if we were to speak too loud.

I walk past the bench with a young dreadlock-attractive couple, the sort that are nationally recognized as being from British Columbia. They both look like they should live starring on Folk Festival posters, but a little more tired, a little more worn around the cuffs of their sweaters and indian cotton shirts. The next bench only has a studious young man all in black, with a pair of new wing tip shoes in a box resting next to him. I sit on that bench, after pinning him on my mental map as the least likely to talk to me, and take out my book instead of strike up conversation. David has thirty-five minutes to arrive with our cash, and then the discount on our tickets will vanish.

The clock ticks..

After every page, I look at the clock, trying not to fret, but thankfully, it all works out. David arrives with our money, the man behind the counter apologizes for the flawed website and the terrible help-desk women who hung up on simple questions, explaining that the help desk offices are located in Dallas, Texas, Nova Scotia, and Bangladesh. He is generous, kind, and completely helpful. (Thank you man-behind-the-counter, you’re excellent.) We buy our tickets, I shake his hand, and we walk off into the night, three minutes to spare.

Wagons ho, we’re going on the 18th.

the trials and travails of nothing in particular

Anyone want a chandelier? How about a lamp? Please?

The weekend was spent moving David from his cave apartment of the mysterious smells to a pleasantly crooked #9932CC-darkorchid room in an old heritage style house on Arbutus street, right across the street from the Ridge Theater. It was an alright move, as such things go. Nothing irreplaceable was broken, nothing precious was lost. It involved many, many boxes of books, one might say too many, really, a veritable library of books, and little else. Some clothes, some furniture, two rabbits, but mostly boxes and boxes of books. I drew a floor-plan before we moved anything, so the chaos was almost instantly organized. Already it’s a habitable room, minus the stuffy proximity of the rabbits, who are currently living under the desk. I feel I should be proud of what I accomplished, though right now I’m too tired, too worn out, and too absently annoyed at my life. (I’m not sure I would date the man who would bring me back to that room.)

My house remains untidy, though order has been emerging in leaps and bounds. It’s possible to see how nice it will look when everything is done, which is new, as before I would examine the apartment and see only disaster. Boxes of extra kitchen stuff, old clothes, and unwanted books have left, either given away to friends or donated, and what’s left is shrinking almost daily as we recycle, sort, and dispose of what we don’t need, want, or could possibly use. It helps, too, that our landlord has finally given in and provided our building with recycling. Where there were piles of folded cardboard and plastic containers, now we have floor-space. It’s almost novel. I’m only sorry I won’t be able to finish everything before I leave for back east.

I’m packing too much into too little time, with too little money, and not enough resources, yet somehow, I plan to survive. To start with, my next two weekends are going to be spent in Seattle. This weekend, I’m biking down with my mother to visit with Kyle “freaking” Cassidy, (who has just proved himself to be utterly fantabulous YET AGAIN), and his lovely beau Trillian, who are in for a wedding, and next weekend I’m going down with Nicole to shot-gun shoot at hipsters with Eliza, who has an art opening. Then, I’m gone for two weeks as I travel by bus to Montreal and Toronto and pray to whatever is available that I’ll manage to pay for it all and still be able to eat.

post midnight update from a nightclub

Quick version: Vancouver->Seattle bus hit by semi. Result: a five hour border wait and a nasty knock to the head. Missed NZ David, was rescued By Adam. Okay now. At the Merc with Joseph, who is a darling.

Now to get back to dancing until I drop from smoke inhalation. My lips have already begun to tingle.

In Seattle this weekend, see you all Monday

Giant squid dissection video.

Since I moved in, there has been an untrusty bike rack outside my building under some scruffy bushes. Untrusty, because it has never been bolted down, and where it sits is completely hidden from the street. As of last night, I have moved it inside to a unused space next to the stairs see what would happen. This morning, someone had already locked their bicycle to it. If, in a few days, management has not shifted it back outside, my bike will join it, a mild victory.

Human plastination photos.

hoping Kyle’s camera arrives in time to make some money

Violent storm uncovers Nazi bunkers buried by sand for 63 years.

I’m planning for my trip back east in September today, figuring Greyhound tickets and time out of the office. (The first official e-mail to my boss just happened). I’m trying to arrange to work remotely while I’m gone, as I’m doing nothing that should glue me to this particular desk. It should be okay. Fingers crossed.

From a quick poke at the Greyhound website, the best trip I can find has us leaving Sept 18th at 6:30 in the morning, ($287.50), arriving in Montreal at 10:20am on the 20th or 21st, leaving Montreal on Thursday, September 25, for Toronto, ($77.40), going to the wedding on the 27th, and leaving Toronto for Vancouver on the 29th, ($287.50), which should bring us back in time for October 1st. This gets David and I out there and back for a total of 652.40 plus some tax, which is about how much it would cost for one on-sale plane ticket. I’m going to physically go to the bus-station, though, and have them figure it out, as maybe we’ll get lucky and find out that booking everything at once makes for a round-trip ticket discount. Anyone have any odd jobs they wouldn’t mind throwing my way? I’m surprisingly handy. Even better, I’ll do a blog post for you by donation. How’s that?

McSweeny’s – Selections from HP Lovecraft’s brief tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler copywriter

another day where I haven’t left the house yet

This makes me happy.

A city dressed in shadows, constant cloud. It was nice to be out of it, alive under sunlight, meeting new people, a trick I have all but lost in Vancouver. Ran out of people, somehow, ran out of patience. Things, moments, miniature adventures dressed like tedious hotel rooms, anonymous, sterile with interstitial furniture.

Getting away was good for me. I’ve come back from Seattle with e-mail addresses and stories of dancing all night, interesting possibilities, and more than one bit of revelation. (Apparently someone’s hard-wired into my system. This would bother me, except that at least I’m aware of it.)

Friday night was a failed attempt to see the laser graffiti up from San Francisco, (they couldn’t get it to work, so after having us stand in the rain for 45 minutes, they gave up, packed up, and left), and Duncan’s yearly party, aka the sort of evening that goes late. I didn’t get home until almost three, at which point my friend Dan came over to crash the night rather than going all the way home to Deep Cove after working downtown, so three turned into four which turned into my alarm, the snooze button, the alarm, then the realization that I was going to be late unless the taxi managed to get me downtown in under eight minutes. A brilliant start.

Once I was on the bus, everything was easier. No one even asked for a ticket. The border snuffled a little at my silly hat, but smiled wryly at my jokes and let me go, and I was picked up immediately when I arrived by a young man with wonderful eyes who canceled out all possible nervousness intelligent people might have had about getting into a strangers car. (I am discounting myself from this group, we all know I get into strangers cars far more than my mother would like). Ten points all across the board. The party itself proved to be a little much at first, as there seemed to be a table-top game being played in every room, but I met some of Silva’s friends outside and stood in the sun long enough that the currents of the house had time enough to shuffle some people out who weren’t obsessively rolling dice.

It was comfortable, settling in, and I’m sorry I didn’t get more contact info for some of the people I spent time with. One girl in particular, short black hair, eyes like jewelry, Erica? She braided my hair into thin whips that fell out over the course of the evening. I didn’t even catch when she was gone the same way I’m not sure when the sun went down.

Eventually the games wound down and the bid to go dancing began in earnest until Sebastien Jon Karl, the man with many names, his friend Robin, and Dan, our host, piled into the car to drive downtown to a place called Noc Noc. Red, black, a giant nailed to the wall above the bar, arms spread, lights in its eyes. I laughed as I ditched my coat, glad at the scurrilous decor, already moving to the music as I rolled ear-plugs out of napkins at the bar.

I hate that Vancouver doesn’t have any all-night dance clubs. I used to practically live in such places, bruised feet every morning, sore muscles at least twice a week, so Noc Noc was perfect, minus the early crowding. (Until the floor, mostly dominated by people who’d been drinking, maybe too much, thinned as the hours went by, I continually felt like killing people who didn’t give me space to properly move.) We lost Robin somewhere around four in the morning, but adopted Steele, a here-to-actually-dance with an uncanny resemblance to a 20-something Antony, and kept going until dawn. It would have been longer, but the prospect of soaking in a hot tub as the sun came up was too nice to pass up. When the sky started showing blue, we threw ourselves out of the club, and drove back to Dan’s house around seven, deciding not to get out of the water until it was officially tomorrow. And, with the fogged lucidity that only the blind-tired can have, that’s what we did.

Breakfast was next, ridiculously huge portions at an odd diner papered with an anarchistic riot of crayon illustrations. From what I could see, the surreal drawings had been created by every skill-level possible. There were scrawls that were barely recognizable as possibly maybe it’s a tree if you squint to hyper-detailed anatomy studies of cthuloid anime characters who may or may not have been sodomizing a smurf underneath a wiccan symbol. (My favourite was a purple realist cartoon of a stripe-tailed lemur wearing a yarmulke and holding a menorah with the words JEWISH LEMUR at the top.) Highly entertaining. As I’m told it’s a 24 hour diner, I’m almost certain to be back there this week. Maybe I’ll get a picture.

We met with Kris there, which was great, and when Sebastian and Steele begged out to go sleep and get boots fixed, she came back to Dan’s house to hang out a bit, meet the cats, and drink some tea before driving home. It made me smile when I found some blurry pictures of us together on my camera during the bus-ride back to Vancouver.

Dan made sure I got to see Gasworks park, finally, before I had to go, for which I’m thankful. That park is some sort of fairy-tale, like the model ruins of an abandoned Wizard of Oz city. It hit home, standing there, why so many artists come out of Seattle, a sense I’d only lived in the edges of before. Suddenly I felt a biting urge to move there, escape Vancouver like a bad relationship to go stay with the neighbor, no matter the guns and dirty politics. Impossible, as of yet, but a new thought. A nice one.

I’m going back for Mike’s gig on Tuesday, though no plans have formalized yet. I don’t know when I’m going or how long I’ll stay.

sort of set the tone for the whole trip

365 day fifty-eight: it's a true story

The Knights Inn hotel in Kamloops was a very special kind of disaster. The staff were perpetually off the premises, the phone didn’t work, the alarm clock was broken, and half of the light-bulbs were burnt out.

As a bonus, the main hall was one of the spookiest rooms I’ve ever been in, which is saying something, as I used to spend nights over in an abandoned hospital. It smelt of burnt talc and rotting dust.

Neat, hey?

dear mercy get me outside during daylight

It’s official, the ticket’s been bought. My new job as the photographer for Bloodlines Magazine is sending me to Kamloops. I fly out on Wednesday, shoot some portraits, stay the night in a hotel, make sure to get a shot of myself jumping on the bed, then fly back Thursday. Beyond the portraits, my time is my own. Does anyone have any suggestions for what there is to do there? The Tourism Kamloops website is a bit discouraging, as it mostly presents curling and Oldtimers Hockey as the thrilling pastimes. (One of the “Fantastic restaurants” it offers is McDonald’s.)

Classic SF movies rendered as Russian folk-art woodcuts.

I’ve just come back from going to FUSE with Ray. A bit of an unfulfilling night, as I’d already seen what the Vancouver Art Gallery has up this month, but I’m glad I went, got our of the apartment, all the same. I’ve been slowly becoming trapped in the mire, knowing that all it takes it to put on some shoes, throw on a coat, and walk outside, but being unable to gather the energy. My year and a half of only work for Heart of the World seems to have sapped my social life almost dry. I barely see anyone anymore, I rarely go out. I’m aware it’s unhealthy, though, so who wants to do something this week? My work claims me sporadically, so I don’t have a very set schedule, but I’m sure if we try, we can work something out.