best of 2004

I'm going to be on a working trip over the next ten days, so my posts will likely be sporadic. I give you a review of the goings-on in Palinode's Palace from 2004 to keep you occupied.

My God, I thought, a 2004 best-of from The Palinode. A rundown of the brightest artifacts from the museum wing of Palinode's Palace. Then: My God, I thought, who gives a rat's ass? No one. But then, who's got an hour to kill at work? Me.

January - April 2004: Nothing, okay? Just nothing. I wasn't here. I lived in a small stone house by a burbling stream in Diaryland.

From May of 2004: a very brief exploration of a Halifax family in a subsidized housing project and their surfeit of mud.

From June: a pop quiz, an elegy to braising, a thing I wrote: Lost Cooking Methods of 1958. A brave exposé of environmenalists and fundamentalists and ugly dogs in Australia's Top End. Photos of old men in T-shirts and old men with sunburns and then some elderly people exhausted by the grandeur of Mount Rushmore.

In July I watched a really crappy movie, modified the word "lacunae" with the superlative "dopiest" in a rant against neoconservatives, dealt with the effects of psychic dislocation while travelling through Texas. I also talked at length about people who talk at length. People who talk at length, by the way, are my bread and butter, but I've never met anyone who could talk at length about bread and butter. And speaking of bread and butter, in a particularly obsessive moment I pulled off an anti-Perecian feat of memory and managed to recall every item of food I didn't eat from the 5th and the 21st of the month. Having accomplished that, I then performed the scientific method on my pet rabbit, with mixed results.

August got off to a promising start. I posted a smashing photo of my wife mauling a cat, which drew howls of protest from PETA. Their vicious attacks drove me to wandering the dumpster-studded alleyways of my neighbourhood, where I found a few pages of a manuscript called "Arrival" strewn around a parking lot. I wrote an insightful analysis of the first page. Then things went a bit wrong when I strapped myself to a high-dive tower sixty feet up in the air and then tried talking to children. My situation improved when I went out on a limb one day and invented a word. I bitched about staying in a five-star hotel in Manila and detailed my adventures in a helicopter over a volcano. Finally, exhausted, I came home.

September started off in the most mundane of places, a business centre. In a dilapidated theatre in a forsaken city on a lonely night I watched the worst movie of all time. Things reached their apotheosis when, in an effort to impress my wife on the eve of my trip to Europe, I went back in time and accidentally turned the present into a consumer-driven dystopia. But all was redeemed when I spent an afternoon with the Klompenboer, the last maker of wooden shoes in Amsterdam.

October was warm. Because I spent it all over Europe. But it didn't stop me from complaining about France, darkly muttering about Germany, ranting about Austria and utterly reviling Wallonian Belgium. Despite my endless bitching, though, I had a wonderful (albeit lonely) time and even found time to bitch about early '90s pop and benefit concerts on the last night of my six-week trip. Europe was the place where I discovered that I was a cheerful adventurous fellow who ended up sounding like a complete misanthrope in writing.

November was the Bathrobe Month. After six week of straight roadwork in six different countries I had the entire month off, which I mostly spent in a haze of scratchy chin, cracker crumbs and marital relations (no link there, sorry). I also sorted through the rolls and rolls of film (what? No digital? What?) that I'd shot on the road. My photos started halfway through the trip, after I bought a secondhand Pentax MZ-7 in Karlsruhe. Compared to The Lotus I am a poor photographer but it didn't stop me documenting modes of transportation, a wonderful Belgian family, and a nervous Georg. Right, and a beleagured lady. And a photo of a child that required patience. Then of course there was that mysterious baby carriage, that nun with pet pigeon and that fetching street corner in Feldkirch, Austria.

Between the posting of photographs I made some hubristic attempts at ludicrous fiction, some strange overreaching fiction, followed up by some strange reflexive fantasy. Some projects were wisely abandoned, others carried on in privacy. Which was the decent thing to do.

December was the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire, paraphraing Eliot, what have you. I found myself back on the road again - Montreal this time, nothing quite so exotic as Europe or the Philippines - and was even given my own office with a view of the fax machine and some fine looking Fedex air delivery waybills. I took my office time as an opportunity to post more pictures: a couple of shots of a graveyard in western Austria, and of course, Jesus and Jesus and Jesus. And Jesus. Whooh! All those Jesuses sure tired me out. Here's sunlight on a mountain to wake you up.

Also in cruel December: I refused to talk about the time Ilocked myself in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant in France, which was wise, but I went on at length about performing experiments with fruit. What all else I did, I no longer remember. It's in the ground with the roots and tubers now. Happy 2005!

red thermals for cold winters

This morning, in deference to the motherfucking cold, I put on some full-body feel-it-all-over wrists-to-ankles underwear. Bright red, buttoned from crotch to clavicle, a trap door in the back for those full-bathroom moments. And I'll be damned if they don't make me feel like a little old man in a cabin in the woods somewhere, armed with a shotgun and smoking a corncob pipe, nothing to keep him company but the howl of wolves and a stack of girlie mags from 1972.

What compelled human beings to show up in a place like this, take a look around and think oh yes, this looks great, no source of water, no hills, nothing but buffalo carcasses and bones, let's set up shop? The answer involves the words "railway" and "money" and "croneyism," but even so. In the midst of winter this city get so cold that its very character begins warp. Sounds echo sharply off buildings, the crunch of snow sounds like styrofoam (comparison via The Lotus), and the entire city puts up so many plumes of steam that it looks like a live-in oil refinery. In the late-breaking dawn the haze of frozen moisture obscures the idling traffic only a block away, occasional streetlights peeking through a corona of ice crystals. When you leave your building the hairs in your nostril freeze at each inhallation. This is the kind of weather that kills joggers, leaving them prostrate in the snow to asphyxiate from frozen lungs. Cold presses against the outer walls of buildings, penetrates doorways. Cold air clings to your coat and legs when you enter from the outside. And when you strip off your bulky outergear and collapse into a comfy chair, it's still cold.

Actually, the cold is manageable. What I hate about winter here is the way all my walking shortcuts are interdicted by snow. My parking lot diagonals and vacant lots, the field next to the train yards, the innumerable back alleys that I prefer to busy streets. Winter maps are relentlessly rectangular and packed with 90 degree angles. That's what winter really is: it's The Man, hassling me and enforcing property rights. Nasty reactionary season.

no image is currently available for this chickenlizard

Palinode: Hey, Lotus. What kind of animal am I? (does something animal-like with his arms and shoulders)

Lotus: I don't know, some kind of lizard?

Palinde: No, this animal's got more energy than a lizard. (does it again with slightly more energy)

Lotus: Maybe it's a chicken?

Palinode: To be honest I'm not sure what animal I'm imitating here.

Lotus: Have you ever looked into a chicken's eyes? They're lizard eyes.

Palinode: Lotus, chickens are birds.

Lotus: Birds are descended from lizards. Their feathers -

Palinode: Chickens are birds, chickens are birds.

Lotus: Their feathers are -

Palinode: chickensarebirds chickensarechickensarebirds chickensarebirds

Lotus: - modified scales.

Palinode: chickensarebirds.

A few minutes later

Palinode: I'd like to transcribe our conversation.

Lotus: Oh, that'd be awesome! (looks around the room, clearly imagining a stenographer in the corner)

Palinode: No, I'd like to transcribe it right now and put it on the web.

Lotus: Hey, that'd take us right through our earlier conversation and then right up this bit where I said 'That'd be awesome'!

Palinode: Yes. Yes it would.

apologetics

Even though I'm not a Christian, I understand that they constitute a persecuted minority and need all the help they can get. So the next time some atheist tries to employ Ockham's Razor as a logical tool for denying the existence of God, I'm going to say, "God doesn't shave". And then, when the atheist stands there shocked into silence, all his arguments falling away from him like a silk teddy falls away from a naughty lady, I'll say, "He doesn't shave. God has a long curly white beard that falls down to his belly. Angels brush it out every morning to keep it shiny and manageable. Then God gets into his Tiamat-pulled ziggurat and space-skis around the cosmos. He pulls doughnuts around the Horsehead Nebula. When He shakes His shaggy mane, comets come a' shooting out. And when Winter blows through the celestial court, that is the End of Days". I'll keep talking, of course, but by then the atheist will have been thoroughly converted. Just doing my bit.

one more thing

Why is this efficient French secretary following me around (Prq c scrtr frnçs ffcc m st-l atr)?

a few things

The first thing (prmr chs): don't bother reading the last two entries (n prn ps l pn d lr ls dx drnr ntrs). They bore me and they're long (ls m'nnnt t ls snt lngs).

The second thing (dxm chs): don't read this entry either (n lt ps ct ntr nn pls). It's deliberately obtuse (c'st dlbrmnt bts).

The third thing: enough of that stuff (ssz!).

The fourth thing: visit this link here and scroll down to the bottom with the two empty images. "No image is currently available for this animal" sounds like Baudrillard discussing the relationship between early colonial exploration and art.

The fifth thing: My favourite thing (and the fifth thing - see start of line) about The Lotus's weblog is having the privilege of reading about my own life from a slightly different point of view. I feel as if I'm part of a biography. I read her stuff and watch the way I pass through another person's life. It's a good feeling to know that I'm doing alright by her.

The sixth thing: No image is currently available for this animal (Aucune image n'est actuellement disponible pour cet animal).

the last man in regina

This and my most recent entry (the last cigarette) were submissions to the next print issue of The National Pist. Editors and executive, please don't hurt me for throwing this stuff up on the web.

If it weren’t for post-apocalyptic B-movies, I don’t think I’d ever have stayed in Regina.

Let me give you some background. In late July of 1989 I took my first walk through Regina’s downtown, having flown in from Halifax only days before. It was a Sunday afternoon, pitilessly hot, the streets wide and bright and empty, and all the silent buildings radiating reflected heat. For a boy raised on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, it felt like a quick dip inside a nuclear attack (remember, the end of the Cold War was still four months away).

Or maybe it was a neutron bomb that had dropped, because as far as I could tell, downtown Regina was utterly empty. Stores may have been open, but no one was entering or exiting. Was this city run from underground bunkers or something? Were tunnels running from deep beneath the earth into The Pant Shack and the Robins Donuts, where pale Reginans with watery pink eyes and blue-veined skin could buy discount jeans?

I began to feel like Cillian Murphy walking the empty streets of London in 28 Days Later, or less presciently, Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth. Price plays the title role, a lone human wandering the deserted cities with a rifle in his hand and a desperate hope in his eyes. The rifle is there to ward off everyone who’s become a vampire, which seems to be everyone in existence. Eventually he runs into a group of people managing to stave off the vampiric pathogen by means of regular vaccinations. They all dress like extras from La Dolce Vita and live from injection to injection, holding bravely on to their humanity. For some reason that isn’t good enough for Vincent Price, who runs around calling them freaks until they shoot him.

It was pretty clear to me that some sci-fi scenario had cleared Regina’s downtown of all life. Despite the horrific heat, I figured that the Soviet Union hadn’t made a last-ditch nuclear attack on Western civilization (I would have seen the Emergency Broadcast Signal on TV, followed by instructions on where to gather). And that whole business with underground tunnels leading to retail outlets seemed a bit too complicated. The vampire sickness seemed the most likely, being at once an elegant an efficient solution to the creepy emptiness of the city streets.

Maybe if I was lucky I could find that enclave of stylish well-armed semi-vampires. Unless, of course, they’d run out of serum, and now my new city had become a horde of bloodsucking zombies and some American tourists up for the Royal Red Horse Show. Any scenario would be better than the alternative – that Regina was populated by people who would sooner shoot Vincent Price in the head than go for a walk on a summer day.

That possibility was so ridiculous that I dismissed it immediately and set about the brutal business of survival in a fallen and forsaken world. Following the example of Mr. Price, I built a small fortress in the south end of the city, foraging by day and defending against vampire attacks by night. It’s something to see these hideous mimics approaching my building as twilight gathers, all of them dressed in the tattered reminders of their former lives and still displaying their habits of old: police in their cruisers at night, postal workers at dawn, Jehovah’s Witnesses in the mid-afternoon. The JWs aren’t vampires, but the garlic seems to keep them at bay as well.

the last cigarette

I still recall the last cigarette I ever smoked, in early August of 2000, sitting on a bench outside the U of R library and rolling up the dried crumbs at the bottom of a pouch of Drum. I ended up rolling four lumpy smokes out of what was left, figuring that the tobacco could get no staler and drier than it already was. As I selected the most promising one and dropped three back in the pouch I tried to push away the anxiety that comes over smokers when they calculate the difference between the number of cigarettes left and the number of days until their next paycheque. In my case, I had nearly a week to go before I saw any more cash. Given my habit, this was an untenable situation.

Despite occasional breaks, I had over the preceding fourteen years come to think of myself primarily as a smoker. I was snobbish about the tobacco I smoked and strangely proud of my facility in rolling cigarettes of such smooth and uniform shape that they looked almost like assembly line products. And I smoked constantly. In 1992 a pouch of Drum lasted me a week, but by 2000 I was able to go through a pouch in about a day and a half. One day I calculated that a pouch would yield seventy of my uniform rollies, which meant that at my peak I was managing to inhale about forty per day, filterless and pitiless.

Whatever anyone may tell you, it is not easy to smoke forty cigarettes in a day. Each cigarette takes approximately five minutes, which means that at least three hours per day is taken up with rolling, inhaling and proper disposal. Consider that I never chain-smoked and you begin to see the awesome commitment that being such a smoker requires. It takes serious discipline and a careful consideration of priorities.

The first thing to go, obviously, is work. Either you pick a job that allows you to smoke constantly or you give it up altogether and seek other means to fuel your habit. I had found what I thought was a good compromise: an office environment made up semi-nomadic herds of smokers, constantly massing at reception and heading to the alleyway behind the building.

Then there’s sleep. I took advantage of a feedback loop. Nicotine helps keep you awake, which frees up more smoking time. True, there’s a point of diminishing returns, followed by a point of diminished capacity and then some drooling, but at 3 AM you feel like going the distance.

Food, as any smoker will tell you, is a scam pushed on people by agribusiness, and completely unnecessary if you smoke. Cigarettes will provide all the nutrition a body needs – you just have to believe (and smoke). The only thing tobacco won’t provide, besides a few trace elements and minerals, is vitamin Coffee. All-night coffee shops are set up all over the city to provide people with this precious resource.

If you’ve been following my inexorable logic, you’ll see where this is leading. Without a need for sleep or food, you don’t really need an apartment, do you? Once you’ve smoked your bed, fridge and stove out of your life, all you require is a backpack with a few possessions, quarters for laundry, and maybe a girlfriend with a place you can crash at every so often. So what if you smell terrible and your teeth and fingers turn the colour of boiled yam? What you’re doing takes self-sacrifice, discipline, and guts. And lungs.

So why did I quit smoking on that August day in 2000? Was it a final recognition of the disgust I felt when dry shreds of tobacco rushed through one end of the cigarette and coated my tongue? Was it the nasty state of my teeth? Was I perhaps tired of measuring out my moments of anticipation and pleasure to fit around an income that didn’t quite support my habit? Health issues maybe?

It was none of those. I lacked the discipline and the strength to carry my habit through to the end. I’m so sorry, tobacco: I let you down. But I’ve promised crystal meth that I’ll do better.

buyer's remorse

On the advice of Pitchfork Media I bought Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, their #2 pick of 2004, and while it's certainly fascinating and an example of that outside the box thinking so prized bytoday's business leaders, I'm not sure it's all that those online musical tyrants promised.

Sung Tongs is not so much an album of distinct tunes with easily discernible melodies as it is a weird continuum of jungle noises, acoustic guitar and a lot of harmonized howls and coos. It reminds me of exotic music, hypermeditative psychedelia and that theme song to Wild Africa. I keep on listening to the album, not out of enjoyment but out of an effort to enjoy it or at least make some sense of what I'm listening to. Maybe 2005 is the year of the reactionary turn to melody and I bought this disc at precisely the wrong moment. I blame history, that merciless bulldozer.

Actually, I suspect that Sung Tongs is the musical equivalent of an ugly person whose ugliness so fascinates you that you can't help staring at them whenever they're around, and one day you realize with a jolt (or simply admit to yourself) that you are in fact quite attracted to mr/ms ugly. I'm already humming along to one of their no-note twelve-minute strum-a-thons as I write.

food against itself

Here's what I would do if I had access to a whole lot of capital and a few neckties (by court order I can't wear neckties until 2007). I would open up a chain of restaurants with the following exciting features:

1. the little bowl of individually-wrapped toothpicks at the counter would be individually wrapped.



2. There would be a little sign next to the toothpick bowl advising customers not to pick out the poisoned toothpick.



3. One of the toothpicks would be coloured bright red. This would not be the poisoned one.



4. Every dish would come with a leaflet listing the ingredients and charting the course of the dish from field and farm to plate. Any animals consumed would be given names.



5. Squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard designed specially to produce those unbearable farting noises.



6. Bolivian-Inuit fusion cuisine at prices the whole family can enjoy.



7. Rump steaks and roasts to be renamed as rudely as possible.



8. Itinerant server staff fired at the end of each shift.



9. Washrooms designed to appeal to the Christian right.



10. All items on the menu expressed as a ratio of calories of fuel consumed to grow and prepare food to calories available to customer.



11. Each restaurant individually wrapped to prevent nasty oxidation.

twos!

Two people in different contexts today have said that my handwriting resembles a code.¹ Two people in my life have wrongly assumed that I write in Arabic.² Two houses that I've visited in Montreal have had a VHS copy of Black Dog in their living rooms.³

Those are all the twos I have for you today.

¹Yesterday my wife (The Lotus) bought me a small notebook, and I decided quickly, after a bit of experiment, that I preferred to stretch my lines across the crease instead of writing short, crabbed lines down each page. I thought my decision represented the kind of innovative dehors la boîte thinking that maverick business leaders are slavering for these days. The Lotus thought it made for a really crude code. Later that very same day my mother peeked over my shoulder and remarked that my handwriting had reached such a pitch of illegibility that it looked like code. I was tempted to argue, but when I reviewed my notes I found that I couldn't read half of what I'd written. Today I reviewed them once more and found that I'd been writing in code to my Christian base.

²Seven or so years ago, somewhere in the horse latitudes of my English degree, I met Jim C_____, a grad student in his mid-forties writing a thesis on Shakespeare's histories. We shared a class in bibliography & methodology. The thing that always stuck in my mind about Jim, besides his small but slightly bulging blue eyes, was that his ruddy brown face and dun-tinged red beard seemed to merge into each other, so that when viewed at a slight distance or from the corner of my eye, he seemed to be suffering from neurofibromatosis or some other disfiguring disease. Everybody called him Red-Faced Jim, which on the whole was politer than Fibrous-Faced Jim or Mr. Merrick. And believe me, calling him Red-Faced Jim was far more polite than what we called another woman in our class whose lips always seemed to be slightly pulled back from her long sharp teeth. We called her Shark Face. Although, latched as she was to the underside of our prof, devouring scraps of praise, she had more in common with a remora. But I digress. And I'm tired of telling you this story, so I'll get to the point. He thought I was Arab and that I took my notes in Arabic, since my complexion is olive (although I never hear anyone specifying what kind of olive) and my handwriting is an uncomfortable contradiction of angles and flourishes, sharp slashes and arabesques. A couple of months ago a coworker wondered if I wrote in Arabic as well. For those of you who read me, I'll let you in on a secret: the arabesques really are Arabic. I'm writing in code to my Arab base.

³That's a long story involving a Montreal Country & Western bar that burned down back in 1972, a financial services advisor who drinks green tea, a volunteer fireman with an anger management problem, and very very incidentally, Hugh Segal. Ask me about it some time.

goodbye de niro

I believe congratulations are in order for Robert de Niro, latest inductee into the Sack of Shit Club for appearing in an American Express commercial disguised as a sentimental paean to New York City. He commits not only his face – radiantly lit, rueful and grim, furrowed here and scored there, engraved with an expression that seems to mourn the constant passing away of the things we love – but even his signature to the commercial’s coda. What’s the matter with you, de Niro? Your career flagging? Restaurants emptying? Tribeca Film Festival dying? I don’t think so. Whatever aura that clung to your name, to your face, is gone now, taken by those who thought to borrow it for thirty seconds on prime time. It was bad when Venus and Serena Williams pretended that McDonalds food made a healthy post-workout meal, but there’s something tragic about watching Robert de Niro take a dump over the city he supposedly loves with the lines “My life is happens here… My card is American Express”. In thirty seconds he transformed himself, chameleonic method actor that he is, from a once-great actor (although his miss-to-hit ratio has been pretty high over the last ten years) to a cynical schmuck, a human sandwichboard willing to drape himself over the highest bidder.

Mind you, it's probably better than Meet the Fockers.

from the gift shop in the san fransisco domestic departure terminal

Once, on the last leg of a three week trip through Australia and the Philippines, I sat in the departure lounge of the San Fransisco Airport and watched them dismantle a gift shop. It was actually a dual event: as shoppers lined up to take advantage of the markdown on knicknacks and coffee table books (even in the midst of leaving for different cities, people were leaping for bargains), men in dark blue shirts stacked stock on trolley carts. Shoppers queuing from the right, movers milling on the left, both groups sucking out the merchandise in good orderly time.

After three days of long flights and layovers I was too exhausted to weave my way around the people and investigate the nearly empty shelves for snowglobes and t-shirts, but as I watched I let my mind spin out a fantasy. I imagined that People were dismantling things behind me as I travelled, that, as in a discarded subplot of Ubik, everything was being put away until my next visit: the shanties of Manila tipped over into the river and its half-constructed shopping complexes all taken down again, then the whole country squeezed together and pushed under the waves. And then Australia rolled up like a giant carpet and tucked under the Antarctic ice sheet. Finally all this tidiness in the guise of dissolution had caught up to us at the San Fransisco Airport. I didn't know it, but the Golden Gate Bridge had been collapsed hours before and all its stays used to tie up the entire Bay Area in a neat package. Any moment now, the men in the dark blue shirts would finish up with the gift shop and start on the magazine store (a store that hid the Rolling Stone issues with Michael Moore on the cover up on a high shelf and turned upside down, which made me realize that a) America was a weird place and b) I could recognize Michael Moore by his feet and legs, which meant my brain was a place as weird as America), then move on to the cafeteria, the payphones and crappy internet terminals, the wall-mounted defibrillators and fire extinguishers, the rows of chairs in their inoffensive colours. I even imagined a small squad of those shirted men on the plane, strategically dismantling the craft piece by piece as we flew.

It occurred to me later that my fantasy was a bit like Stephen King's story The Langoliers, in which a group of passengers on an airplane get stranded in the immediate past and must escape it before they're consumed by the voracious recycler-predators of the story's title. I prefer my fantasy to King's story - in my imaginings there's no urgency or need to escape anything, since I'm synchronized so precisely with the men in the dark blue shirts that they will never quite catch up with me. They appear to be minutely faster, but it's an asymptoptic approach. Perhaps I hand them the complimentary flight magazine as I deplane. For reasons I can't quite explain, the whole notion of the world being taken down behind me as I go gives me a quiet sense of ease and safety. And in case I haven't mentioned it before, the San Fransisco departure area has the crappiest duty-free in the world. And no gift shop anymore either.

the econversations

I'm one of those, whatyacallit, fans of overheard conversations in crowded places. Unfortunately, I don't get to hear a whole lot of them, or at least not ones that make any sense. My most commonly overheard conversation these days is the one that my upstairs neighbours like to have around two in the morning, which usually goes like this:

HIM: Mmmm... mmm...
SHE: Ahh. AAAAHHH! AAAAAAAHHH!
HIM: MMMmmm.

That one's a keeper. What it lacks in syllables, it makes up for in brio. And it sounds more exciting than the lesbian couple who used to live next to us and mostly sounded like they were holding back a sneeze when they had sex. But these aren't the kind of overheard conversations that I enjoy. I prefer the kind with actual sentences, a smidge of context, and an ironically amusing punchline. The kind that happen in coffee shops, at intersections, around water coolers (those really do happen!). Or the kind that I imagine happening between webloggers:*

Kittycoo: Shamus and I haven't spoken together for six months and I think that's best. He is just so negative and insulting to me that I wish he wasn't my first ever cat I owned.

Mylife24: Somewhere a woman I don't know in circumstances I don't understand is getting an abortion, and that makes me mad. I'd feel a lot better if she didn't do it.

Nolump: My battle with breast cancer has been a life-affirming gift. It's made me realize that I'm a much better person than everyone else. Especially ones with two breasts.

Scozzy: All youz bitchez get offa my hump!!! Shout outz to mah dogz in thah burbz!

Parousiac: My beliefs and values tally exactly with an invisible man in the sky who runs the cosmos.

Festlock: My inability to bear children has given me the uncanny ability to relate everything I experience to the fact that I cannot bear children.

Googoo: Today I had some random rambling incoherent musings while I was watching TV or shopping or something.

Patriota1: Lately I've been starting to think that everyone who comments on my blog is part of a conspiracy of the cultural/financial elite who run this country and are seeking ever more vicious ways to silence me.

Publicmind: I sincerely believe that living in my mother's basement and surfing the web with her broadband connection constitutes an active political life.

Scarletfraulein: Being a prostitute in a major city is actually really really exciting, whatever the early films of Scorcese may imply.

Kulturkampf: This blog is meant to stimulate intellectual conversation amongst a select group of blog members. Has anyone else here been subjected the inane demands of yet another Christmas season? I no longer find all this "goodwill" particularly drôll.

Fireislexile: I'm gay gay gay gay gay and a dad.

Bipole: i don't know what's wrong with me today, i can't get excited about anything, this afternoon i made a milkshake but it didn't taste too good.

Newrealitydawns: I will singlehandedly take down the Loonie Left by cutting and pasting from the Drudge Report.

Buddyman: Ha ha, I met a guy of a different ethnic background the other day, and WOW was it crazy! And you all know my history of meeting guys from different ethnic backgrounds, right? NO, not like that, you dirty dudes!

Hottcupple: MMMmmm... MMM... AAAAAAAAAAHHH!!... ahhh... ahhh...

*Entirely fictitious. Any resemblance etcetera.

suggested pizza marketing slogan

Exciting Slices.

That's my gift to pizza concerns everywhere. Forget the P'zone Revolution, never mind Getting More Of What You Love, don't Get The Door because It's Dominos. Help yourself to Exciting Slices today.

FAQ

1. What's so great about Exciting Slices?
Possibly it's the rising and falling action of the stresses - the sense that you're being buoyed up to ecstatic heights by the second and third syllables, only to be gently slid down on the soft sibilants of 'slices' to reality once more, a reality leavened by the possibility of a piece of pizza - that really gets consumer attention. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of that brittle 't' amongst all those softer, squishier sounds that recalls the combined crunch of crust and yielding dough. Maybe it's a combination of all these things.

2. Are you really giving this slogan away for free? What a deal!
A deal? It's an out-and-out steal, the purest thievery going. Any pizza company that hitches their wagon to this star, this solar burst of marketing savvy, will find itself hurtling through the pizza-sales cosmos. And I ask for nothing in return but the satisfaction taken in witnessing the success of others.

3. Man, if this is your free offering, you've obviously got some great stuff to offer the world of prepared food marketing. Care to give us a glimpse of what else you've got in store?
Sure. For those engaged in the production of niche-market foods such as Ferruginous Hawk Pie or Trace Elements & Minerals Biscuits, I have developed comprehensive plans with marketing research, publicity packages, and five-year projections. I don't want to give too much away, but I can tell you that, thanks to my efforts, the traditional Christmas turkey dinner may soon become a Festive Ferruginous Feast. Oh yes: "Hawk!" the herald angels will be singing for 2005.

4. Okay, what if I were to beat you where you stand for posting this on the internet? I mean beat you so bad that you couldn't walk or sit properly for the next six months? I'm trying to impress on you here a total thrashing.
That would be entirely fair.

a late addendum

I forgot to mention earlier that everything I write in this weblog is one hundred percent true. Not one sentence, not one clause (super- or subordinate!) or even prepositional object is in any way even the slightest deviation from the truth. The cold hard kind.

That is why it gives me such pain to tell you that your grandmother just died.

distracted gods

Today at one of the many crap restaurants that this city has to offer I found myself so deeply engrossed in a book that I misheard the climactic line in the second verse of "Silent Night" as "Christ our saviour is bored".

It would make a lot of sense if this were the actual line, since not much seems to be happening in the song. Aside from the birth of humanity's saviour, there isn't much to see. The shepherds are freaked at all the glories streaming from Heaven afar, but it's hard to really picture streaming glories, isn't it? It almost sounds like some weird patriotic desert or a cracked interior design idea. As if some well-meaning mother sent her college-age son a copy of a Good Housekeeping 'Spruce Up the Home for Tight Budgets' special. And the next line, with its heavenly hosts singing, only confirms that what those shepherds wandered into was a suburban Christmas party, with non-alcoholic punch at the table and streaming glories hung from the chandelier. Or maybe they're baking up in the oven - I haven't settled on what exactly those streaming (not steaming) glories are. They're either made of crepe or they're crepes. The point is, this is precisely the kind of scenario that would upset a batch of Bronze Age sheperds and bore the alpha and omega off of Christ.

Frankly, I'm more worried about what Christ would do if he were bored. I'm no Christian, but sometimes I get the sense that the existence of this world is dependent on the Lord's good will, and if he grew tired of it then he may snuff out the cosmos between his forefinger and segmented chitinous limb thumb with no more feeling than we apply to a mosquito or an episode of Joey. So the moral is, because I've clearly been building up to a moral here and you've all been very patient, the moral is not to spend your Christmas in a way that might provoke boredom or indifference in The Jesus. Spike the punch, take down the streaming glories, don't sing alleluias to your party guests, and above all remove your pants early on in the evening. It doesn't have to be a sex thing, just do it. It is well in His sight.

The book was Dale Peck's collected critical essays.

communicading

A few days back The Lotus mentioned on her site that I was incommunicado for the next few days. For the few of you who drop by and read my words, I thought I'd drop a quick line and let you know that I'm not entirely incommunicado. I'm just in Montreal until tomorrow afternoon, whereupon I will communicad in text, pictures, gestures, honks, what have you. This city is covered in thick wet snow, with cars ploughed in and sidewalks either obscured entirely or covered in a smooth deadly sheet of ice. But it just can't stop the joie de vivre, no, not here, not in la belle province.

I just can't figure out why, if Montreal is supposed to be a centre of culture, I keep hearing The Alan Parsons Project on the radio.

A stripe of light high up the Walserthal.

jade restaurant, skeleton key

Some people want copper plumbing, some want uncritical acceptance of their exotic pet. Others want humorous anecdotes. That I can supply, unless I already told you about the time I got locked in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant in the south of France.

Oh, I did? Never mind. I hate to repeat myself, especially about the French-speaking Chinese guy who shouted at me through the bathroom door to slip the key underneath the door so he could let me out, but I was too claustrophobic and he was too impatient, so we just shouted back and forth in a few different languages until I figured out what he wanted, and when he let me out the entire restaurant was staring, since they're everyone's curious to see some guy who's stupid enough to get himself locked inside a bathroom. My cameraman wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the meal.

Maybe I could join a circus sideshow as P. Node the Bathroom Dweller. Crowds would gather to watch me through the plexiglass wall as I washed my hands repeatedly, banged on the door, twisted the key and called for help through the keyhole. "My Ma Po Tofu is getting cold!" I would scream, causing sensitive ladies in the audience to collapse backward into the throng. Then a gigantic Asian man in a thong would come out in a thong, bellowing "Donnez-moi le clef, cochon Canadien!"

70 Buttons!

70 Buttons, by Bernard Rudofsky.

This piece appeared in Rudolfsky's 1944 show "Are Clothes Modern?" which appeared at the Modern Museum of Art. This image sucked through the straw of my scanner from the December 2004 issue of Harpers. According to the caption, "the press release described the project as a 'simulated X-ray examination of the layers upon layers of useless buttons and pockets man considers necessary to preserve dignity'".

What I find intriguing and a bit creepy about the piece is the way in which the buttons express a slightly skewed bilateral symmetry, looking like a pointillist's version of the endochrine system, or maybe a diagram of chakras major and minor. See the vital verebrae? The thyroid neatly marked at the throat? That little mandala radiating from the abdomen? The trouser button at the groin? Best of all are the military formations at each sleeve bracketing the whole affair.

After the eye gets tired of tracing the outlines and mentally matching the clothing to the points of colour, you start looking at the body. No doubt that style of sketching the body has some pedigree, but I don't recognize it. From those thalydomide-manatee feet to the smooth barrel of a body and the tilted profile of a head, what you get is a kind of embryonic merman with a pensive attitude. Maybe he's standing on the ocean bed, decorated with the buttons of drowned gentlemen, watching the surface for someone with an suitable set of boots.

Bernard Rudofsky is best known for his book Architecture Without Architects, recently reprinted by the always-outnumbered-never-outgunned University of New Mexico Press. Rudofsky died in 1998.

Sure, a piece of scripture would be appropriate here, but I just ain't gonna.

more

suddenly everything went black and white.

sleepytime.

more

graveyard, Blons, Western Austria

youth concern

Enough of these deep South troglodytes obsessed with controlling our childrens' genitals:

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda" ... Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed ... If the bill became law, public school textbooks could not present homosexuality as a genetic trait and public libraries couldn't offer books with gay or bisexual characters. The bill also would ban materials that recognize or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama. Allen said that meant books with heterosexual couples committing those acts likely would be banned, too.

I used to think that uptight fundies were obsessed with the traitorous genitals of gay men and women, but I'm wondering if I haven't been wrong all along. It seems that, with their constant cries about the need for protecting our unsullied youth, that what they're really thinking about are the genitals of children. It must be pure torture for them, walking the legislative halls and standing at church pulpits, trying to get through the day without thinking about childrens' genitals and all the sodomizing those genitals could do. I propose that these upright citizens form a group to keep those lurid Wildean texts away from impressionable children, something with a name like No Access to Minds Blemished by Lascivious Actions. Or something like that.

Go Orioles! Wax on!

If you're gay in Michigan you can't get married but you can always get screwed. The governor of Michigan is pulling same-sex benefits for state workers. Voters decided to ban gay marriages "and similar unions for any purpose" on Nov. 2nd, so the politicians are dutifully carrying out the will of Republican legislators the people.

I'm not sure what is meant by "similar unions". Is there a Rev. Phelps acolyte writing the state constitution, worrying that men and horses, football teams and their mascots, Tom Cruise and his robot double will start getting hitched if they open the door to same-sex behitchings? Are we looking to prevent crazy-ass fundamental Mormon polygamy from degrading the institution of marriage? How about the phrase "for any purpose"? Let's say I enter into a civil union with an old VHS copy of The Karate Kid in order to help the Orioles win the pennant. Guess that means no pension for either of us in Michigan. California, on the other hand, is anxious for some fresh absurd perversion. I'm pitching that one to Hollywood.

fruit, mobility, science

Earlier this evening at the Shopper's Drug Mart I spotted the upright Fruit To Go display standing prominently at the end of the snack aisle. This is not to be confused with Del Monte's Fruit To-Go, a sadly backward looking fruit-cup product dragged down by the space it takes up on shelves and the hyphen in its name. The Fruit To Go I'm talking about belongs to the fruit leather family, the plant kingdom's answer to beef jerky. It's also the convenience store's solution to produce sections: condense the produce into wafers of spongy cardboard, thereby reducing precious space needed for Harry Potter books, cheap DVD players and bins of industrial refuse sweat-shopped and packaged to look like teddy bears. You know, for kids.

Fruit To Go, its loud packaging notwithstanding, is pretty impressive stuff - conveniently sized, tasty (if a little spongy), and the #1 Canadian fruit snack in the crucial demographics of Moms and Kids. Although it comes in nine mouth-watering flavours, the fruit leather is overwhelmingly apple-based, which places it at the vanguard of healthy eating. Apples, according to the Sun_Rype website, halt heart disease in California, prevent asthma in England, cure cancer in Chicago, smooth your skin in Sydney, manage diabetes in Finland, and spike brain power everywhere. It's no wonder that Moms and Kids are running the country, so healthy and smart they must be from the constant chewing and digestion and extraction of vital health-giving chemicals and nutrients of Fruit To Go.

Despite its obvious position as uber-snack, though, I couldn't figure out why it was called Fruit To Go. In what way was it more mobile than standard fruit? Its convenient - and yes, fun - size may make it slightly easier to fit into a backpack or a purse, but not significantly so. And the advantage of size that pertains with apples and bananas disappears entirely when you compare a grape-flavoured Fruit To Go with an actual grape. Most F2Gs weigh less than their natural counterparts by several grams, which may count for something in endurace races or continent-spanning hikes, but those type of people form such an exclusive demographic that it seems dishonest to base claims on statistically insignificant populations. Its uniformity of shape makes it easier to transport, yes, and better suited for our sleek modern lifestyle, but a single pineapple can span half the globe before it hits your supermarket. In fact, it seemed that F2G was superior to fruit in every possible way except for its mobility.

What was going on here?

I decided to apply the scientific method, just as I had learned it in grade 4 or thereabouts. My hypothesis: That F2G was more mobile than 'real' fruit. My experiment: drop a piece of F2G with/without packaging and a standard-sized Gala apple, produce code 94133, simultaneously from my bathroom window. Expected result: F2G, being more mobile and therefore faster than a Gala apple, will hit the ground first. Really, the experiment was more concerned with determining the degree to which F2G outraced 'real' fruit than determing which had the greater mobility. I also threw a bust of Franz Liszt out the window as a control. I'd never understood the concept of the control, but I expected its role to become clear as the experiment progressed.

I would like to point that the following experiments were not without some sacrifice on my part. The winter weather often invaded the apartment and produced in me a chill that many blankets could not dispel. If it was hard on me, it was equally hard on my wife and particularly nasty for the African violets and the spider plants. Bluey the Canary passed on not long after the experiments, and I suspect it was at least in part the result of my scientific zeal. Bear in mind that I am not a prize-winning scientist with a grant from the Department of Defense. I am just a man working furiously to bridge the gap in his knowledge of fruit. And there was no end of grief from the landlord.

Experiment #1: Extending both arms out the window in an attitude perpendicular to the ground, I held a sample of New Tropical Punch F2G in my left hand and the apple in my right. With the help of my wife, a tape measure and a level that I'd borrowed from my parents' garage, I ensured that both items were exactly 5.5 metres from the ground. I placed an ironing board in the front yard at the expected points of impact. Wind speed was determined by Environment Canada and duly factored in. My wife counted down from three and I dropped the items.

Result: Utter shock. Consternation. Unexpected sneezing. The apple dropped swiftly and silently to the ironing board, while the New Tropical Punch, caught by a current of air, twisted in mid-air, veered off course and fell at least two feet off target. It didn't even hit the ironing board! It fell in the snow and got wet. My wife, who had been charged with timing the fall, forgot herself, standing open-mouthed on the lawn. We decided to repeat the experiment with altered variables. In strict accordance with scientific prinicples I threw the bust of Liszt out the window and accidentally struck the landlord on the shoulder. He had come to observe, apparently suspecting us of attempting to skip out on rent.

Experiments #2-25: Tried every conceivable variable we could think of: waxed apple, washed apple, every flavour of F2G, various wind speeds, different heights (borrowed upstairs neighbours' bathroom - hard to explain). Even removed the stem from one apple in my attempt to exhaust the possibilities. Bust of Liszt in bad shape. Landlord threatening to evict. Sniffling. Fingers stiff and recalcitrant. Damned weak flesh! Must perservere.

Results: No matter what we tried, the 'real' fruit always fell in a straight line and hit the ironing board long before the F2G fluttered down nearby. Indeed, the farther the distance from the ironing board ('ground'), the greater the difference between their respective landing times. I wondered if perhaps there were a special attraction between natural fruit and the fabric of the ironing board, going so far as to write several paragraphs on the subject before giving up in complete disgust. I was dangerously close to admitting that my original premise was false, and that Sun-Rype had misled the public about its product, inexplicably advertising the one quality that it did not have.

The breakthrough came when I started comparing the distance travelled to the duration of the fall. In every case, the Fruit To Go had covered a greater distance than the linearly descending apple. The distance that the F2G covered in a five metre fall was hard to determine, given that its flutterings and convulsions evoked a fractal quality in my calculations, but there was no doubt that Fruit To Go will cover a greater distance in a given span of time than a piece of natural fruit. Somewhere between the orchard and the convenience store, the processing and reconstitution, the dehydrating and refining and mashing and extrusion and pasteurization and transportation and packaging, the accomplished scientists at Sun-Rype had added mobility to their product.

It's probably something in the artificial flavours.

Martin and the Betacam battery. It's transmitting information to him that he'll need when the apocalypse comes. No, really.

Barbara and Suzanne meet the horrible horrible Betacam.

Our interpreter in Belgium, Barbara, with her children Suzanne and Martin. Martin est fatigué.

Peevish man at Heidelberg Zoo. While I distract him with the camera, the shrubbery advances on him from the right and takes his wallet.

This is not a great photo of monkeys, but it's all I've got. Heidelberg Zoo.

all europe is down with the smartcar, yo.

Man waiting for bus, Karlsruhe.

Red building in Karlsruhe.

Georg S_____ is nervous because I'm in his house taking photos of him without explanation. I kept photographing until he produced this expression.

Nun with pet pigeon, Feldkirch.

Matching coats in Heidelberg.

Streetcorner, Feldkirch.

Two men in Feldkirch.

Under the bridge over the Rhein.

coffee time... um... coffee time...um...

Yesterday at a local coffee house I saw a donation cup for the local cell of the Alzheimer's society. I began to imagine the Alzheimer's society as a terrorist network relying on the good will and loose change of coffee drinkers to advance their nefarious (but likely outdated) agenda. I figure that if you staff your cells with Alzheimer's patients, they'll never reveal any information when CSIS rounds them up and wheels them away. Better yet, they'll refer to their interrogators as "Uncle Pete" or "Father St. George". Whatever their agenda is (Free the Falangists!) I intend to fight it with meaningless italicization.

Like so:

Attention, Alzheimer terrorists attempting to conquer Prussia, Rhodesia and the Ottoman Empire! Stop what you're doing immediately and sit with your hands folded on the front steps of the burlesque house until the Doukhobors have passed safely through town. Then approach the constabulary and offer a full accounting of your childhoods! That is all.

mysterious fragment found scribbled in a back flyleaf

“... therefore we spent our afternoons exploring the gardens in Palinode’s palace, wandering among the overgrown topiary, chasing spiders along their webs with the tip of a twig, studying the map at the entrance of the hedge maze - now abandoned so long that the hedges had choked off some paths and opened new ones. To enter that maze was to lose your way instantly and turn an afternoon’s diversion into a dark, confusing adventure".
A.G. Morgan, A Summer in Palinode’s Palace (1929) (?)

I found this in a hardbound copy of Dombey & Son when I was nine years old or so. The book rested on the top shelf of my father's bookcase, part of a complete set of Dickens published in 1875 or thereabouts. My father had inherited the set upon graduating from Royal Military College, and though he went to great pains to encourage me to read Dickens, it was clear that these editions were not to be opened or touched. Therefore it was always in secret, at stolen moments on weekend afternoons or even in the predawn hours that I would hoist a chair up in the kitchen and walk it aloft into the living room, my skinny nine year old muscles trembling, and pull down a volume from the shelf. Generally I didn't read any of the text - they were all available in paperback on the lower shelves - but I loved to look at the frontispiece, with its fine crosshatching and expressive faces. I even loved the verso, with its information finely engraved at the foot of the page. Chapman & Hall Publishers. 193 Picadilly. The brief fragment, handwritten in violet fountain pen, first scared me - handwriting in my dad's volumes! - but soon after began to intrigue and then pester me. When I grew a little older I began to look for A Summer in Palinode's Palace in various libraries and used book stores, but without success.

More later.

the perils of speaking out loud II, or the perils of even listening

After a conversation I overheard in a coffee shop today, I'm pretty sure that the aliens have landed and now walk among us, attempting to learn our ways in order to conquer us. Or in order to order a cup of coffee.

Server (Earthling): What would you like?
Customer (clearly a green tentacled alien stuffed into a human suit): Uh yeah. I'll uh... Americanus doublo... Americano?
Server: You'd like an Americano?
Customer: Yeah, what's that?
Server: It's a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso in it.
Customer: (extending tentacle sensor, hurriedly retracting it): Yeah, okay. What's the double?
Server: That's two shots of espresso.
Customer: Oh, I see.
Server: So, a double Americano?
Customer: Well, I'd like the espresso, but I don't think I have time for the coffee... (N.B. - none of this dialogue is made up) so I guess I'll have one to go.
Server: A double Americano to go?
Customer: Do you think I have time to drink it inside?
Server: (somehow intuiting actual meaning behind near-phatic question, holding up mug) We serve it in a cup this size, so if you're in a hurry you'll want to get it in a to-go cup.
Customer: (mulls it over, establishes neural link with mothership, reaches decision) Oh, I don't have time for that. Maybe I'll get a double espresso for inside.

Perhaps this conversation isn't as strange as I'm making it to be. It certainly seems like a long way round to get a double espresso. Perhaps he was not an alien but some kind of Caffeine Hunter attempting to outsmart his drink.

Outside I heard this conversation:

Dude A: Dude [B], look at this motherfucker. Take a look at this fucking motherfucker!
Dude B [to Dude C, the fucking motherfucker]: Fuck, motherfucker. Fuck. What the fuck's happening?
Dude C, "the fucking motherfucker": Fuck, dude, I don't fucking know. Fuck's happening with you, motherfucker?

I don't know those guys get organized. They all seem to have the same name.

the perils of speaking out loud I

When we extended a post-election invite to Americans who wanted to flee to Canada, this really wasn't what we meant.

Sheesh.

clearing up a misconception

As many of you know, newspapers all over the world have reported that Condoleeza Rice has been tapped to fill Colin Powell's position. If you visit the official White House site, though, you'll see that it's the oil tanker Condoleeza Rice who will be Bush's Secretary of State for his second term in the Oval Office:

Washington (AP) -- The giant Chevron tanker, renamed the Altair Voyager not long before Rice left Chevron to become Bush's National Security Adviser, expressed its excitement at the appointment in a special news conference.

"As the first double-hulled tanker to be appointed Secretary of State, I promise fewer spills, an unblemished safety record and prompt delivery of unrefined policy to all corners of the United States".

"Even though I am only nine years old and officially registered in the Bahamas, I assure you that neither my youth nor my deceptive transnational identity will impede my performance".

The Rice then spewed oil over the assembled reporters. "That's my precious lifeblood and cool drink of water all rolled up in one!" exclaimed the "Suezmax" ship, so termed because its girth is the maximum allowable for passage through the Suez canal.

When asked about its name change in 1999 to the Altair Voyager, it said: "Chevron officials, including my namesake, felt that it was inappropriate to associate a senior Bush cabinet official with the myriad oil spills, human-rights violations and general rapine qualities of the oil industry. It would have been tacky to remind everybody that the Bush administration has forgotten the distinction between those who govern in the people's name and those who kick the Earth's ass to make a buck". The ship continued, "So yeah. They changed my name".

The Rice then spewed more crude on the crowd. "Sorry about that," it remarked. "A reef breached my hull a few days ago".

After repairs, the new Secretary of State plans to make a diplomatic visit to the nations of Nigeria and Angola.

from the department of dread prescience

Not two weeks ago I was grousing on this very site about the persistence of Band Aid on the radio. I concurred with Neal Ascheron of the New York Review of Books that Africa functions as some inexhaustible vein of misery from which Westerners feed. And now, twenty years later, a group of pampered Brit-poppers are banding together once more to sing that "Do They Know It's Christmastime" song again. Again. I tell you, we need the Middle East for its oil, China for its Wal-Mart-supply sweatshops, and Africa for its burden of suffering. From various parts of the globe we procure the goods and the energy sources that make our lives easy, and from various bits of Africa we procure the empathy and compassion that allows us to feel at ease with the cheap goods and cheap energy. Everybody rallied behind the "Feed the World" mantra of Band Aid and Live Aid and whatever else, because "the world" in that case simply meant "Ethiopia," and back in 1984 we had the luxury of pretending that Ethiopia's famine came about by a regrettable but natural drought. Never mind a war with Eritrea that had been hacking up the countryside for the last ten years. I wonder whether a new but still Bono'd Band Aid can persuade the pampered millions to part with the 14.99 or whatever it'll cost. THEY'LL JUST DOWNLOAD IT OFF KAZ@A, YOU FOOLS! THE MILLIONS WILL STEAL FOOD RIGHT OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF STARVING... OH... RWANDANS OR LES COTE D'IVORIENS OR WHOMEVER. THOSE WITH ARMS LEFT WILL THROW THEM IN THE AIR AND SCREAM OUT "WHY, CONSUMERS OF INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS? WHY?" And so forth.

ignition loaf

Bread generates its own heat. You ever noticed that? Leave a loaf of crappy store-bought sugar 'n' horsehooves bread in its bag out on the counter for an afternoon, then reach in. You're sticking your hand into a puffed latticework of carbohydrate fire. I wonder if the right circumstances ever get together and nudge a loaf of Wonda into full combustion. Strange conflagrations blamed on babysitters, errant Christmas fires that have the forensic teams sniffing at sockets: I bet it's the bread left out on the counter.

bored blurry blogger spots a mirror

In the Achat Hotel, Karlsruhe. The Lotus says that the picture is interesting because it makes my head look deformed.

leisured indigent in Karlsruhe

This appeared to be two homeless guys and two fixed-address types on the left. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you'll notice that the man on the far left is giving me an irritable glare.

streetcorner in downtown Karlsruhe

a favourably inclined bicycle by the Karlsruhe Waschhaus

in europe they park all perpendicular like

We need more of these Smart Cars in North America. They run on pure Fahrvergnugen.

Karlsruhe girl

This is one of those photos that you wait for, assuming a statue-like pose until the correct moment suddenly turns its face towards you. I stood in a plaza in Karlsruhe just two blocks down from the shop where I bought my camera, waiting for this little girl to look in my direction.

in belgium: the man with a bag of lead

This is Philippe van D_______, a crazy Wallonian who brought a bag of lead to an interview. Don't ask.

nanowrimotosis

Oy. My novel is getting away from me, only two days after its launch. Instead of meandering along with the story of a guy bleeding on the floor of a jeepney crawling through rush-hour traffic in downtown Manila, I let my brain devise an impossible task. I gave my brain a path and it duly planted a few hedges and transformed it into a labyrinth of ridiculous ambition. I’ll spare you the pain of reading a novel that requires of me hours of research and a cursory knowledge of eighteenth century Spanish, but here’s a vague outline so far:

In our first installment we watched a man stealing a pair of polka-dot boxers from a clothesline strung across a Manila alleyway. For reasons unknown, he’s being pursued through the city by unknown pursuers (this unknown quarry). For further unknown reasons, he’s broke and filthy. He jumps onto a jeepney cab, where the pursuers catch up to him, beat him up and take the boxer shorts back. I have decided to retract that last plot point, since it’s more interesting to keep up a chase scene and anyway, a man in bad straits needs a change of underwear. Who is this guy? Why is he being pursued? What’s the deal here anyway?

He calls himself CW, which is short for Cardoza-White. His first name is Frederick. He has come to Manila from the US to locate distant relatives named in his mother’s will. Or you may say that he has come to spend an enviable inheritance in a foreign country before other family members think to contest the will. He locates a far-removed cousin named Apolinair Cardoso di Ocampo, who claims to be the only living family member left in the Philippines. Apolinair talks a mile a minute, owns a house full of animals and children, and is accompanied wherever he goes by a forty year old “boy” named Ferdinand. He seems to make his living by hosting beauty pageants and organizing eco-tours for German tourists. Apolinair calls him “Mr. Fred” at some moments and “my American cousin” at others. He promises to tell CW the story of their shared family, but confusingly, he tells him two distinct stories: the one of a family of Portuguese aristocrats who died in a volcanic eruption that sank the cities of the Provincia Taal into the sea in 1754; the other of a U.S. soldier stationed in the Philippines around 1900 who fathered several legitimate children and a number of illegitimate ones. It turns out that he also participated in the Balangiga Massacre of 1901 as well, the sort of brutal killing spree that occupiers occasionally carry out against the occupied.

It gradually dawns on CW that both his father's and his mother’s family have come to the Philippines in centuries past, and that the separate branches there have eventually intertwined, just as they have in North America. Or at least, this is what Apolinair tells him. But how did the White family cross lines with the Cardosos? And what were a family of Portuguese aristocrats doing in a country so thoroughly colonized by the Spanish? Just how much of what his cousin tells him is trustworthy? Whatever the answers are, we know that CW ends up running like hell through the city streets, filthy and broke and bleeding. With stolen boxers.

You see? I need to shave this thing down a little, or at least read a few books on Filipino history. Maybe I should get back to that post-apocalyptic story about the rich Australian teenager who ends up living in an underground shelter with a bunch of military freaks and rich white guys.

this one sucks so I'll put up some photos next

I came late as usual, but I’m here and now you’re stuck with me. National Novel Writing Month started ten days ago, but I’m going to give it a go nonetheless. I’ll even try it natheless. Can you believe it? Natheless and wearing my polka-dot boxers, I’ll churn out as much prose as possible between now and the 29th of November, when I’m scheduled for my next trip into the world of equipment hauling and the coaxing of dimly-remembered stories of misery from elderly people (necessarily of limited success, since most of the elderly people I speak to are experiencing plenty misery in the present. They’re more interested in talking about the children that ignore them and the body that is shutting itself down, organ by organ, sense by sense. But they talk anyway, you know. Natheless.). For those of you who don’t know, National Novel Writing Month demands 50 000 words from its participants but places no constraints on content. You can write about nostril hairs, international intrigue, shameful masturbatory fantasies, whatever you like. You don’t need characters, plot, theme, setting, or mood. You don’t even need to determine if the main conflict will be man vs man, man vs self, or man vs nature. You don’t need paragraph breaks. All you need are sentences, really, and they don’t require subordinate clauses. No ordinances necessary.

You can even, if you wish, write about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you must have fiction, then you can pretend to be someone else writing about Nanowrimo. You can pretend to be wearing someone else’s polka-dot boxers, a pair you grabbed off a laundry line while running at breakneck speed through the backyards of a South End neighbourhood. Maybe you found the clothesline anomalous in these days of automatic dryers, and so you leapt up in mid-run, clutching at a pair of bright red boxers with orange and white polka-dots, your hand closing around the fabric and the clothes pins popping free off the line. Maybe you were surprised (as surprised as your pursuers?) as your body carried you past the line, the boxers bunched in your hand, your foot hitting the ground and you with a new pair of underwear. Suddenly you’re a thief on top of a trespasser, never mind whatever it was you did in the first place to be going at breakneck speed through somebody’s backyard in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Maybe the neighbourhood’s not even nearby. It could be that you’re tearing through an alleyway in Manila, a side lane thick with clotheslines, white sheets and football jerseys, all colours pale except for those boxers. You spot them and leap up, knowing that you’re far enough ahead of your pursuers that this one suspended moment won’t matter that much, knowing that you can cut through this street and emerge onto Edsas Boulevard, where a jitney can take you straightaway to Makati. There are so many Westerners in Makati, shopping at the Gap and pulling down their face masks to sip Starbucks, that you can blend in. But the men after you will stick out there. You bet that there are at least a few stores in the Makati malls where you can casually enter and browse while a polite store guard armed with a shotgun escorts your pursuers beyond the gates. Even in the stained jeans and the filthy brown barong, you’re still Western, still the receiver of unearned privilege. And you’ve still got that sharp suit jacket to cover the worst of the stains and the fact that you have no wallet – that you are, in fact, flat broke and cut off from the only people in the country who could help you. At least you’ve got a pair of polka-dot boxers.

Nanowrimo does want 50 000 words of you, but there’s no need to stick to those kinds of standards. Especially since that’s the only standard they’ve got. I think that expectations should have a critical mass; if they’re sufficiently low, you can ignore even those. Maybe I’ll put a slogan on a T-shirt: Give Me Nearly Nothing To Fight For And I Will Surrender. Anyway. I’d edit this stuff out, but hey - this in Nanowrimo, the anything goes attempt to get fingers dancing on keyboards. I think that if I can produce two pages a day for the next two and a half weeks, you will all be tremendously bored with my weblog. Natheless I prevail.

Some people don’t need this brand of encouragement. Mimi Smartypants, that Polaris in the weblog firmament, actually restricts her output to 2000 words per entry. How she manages that much in the first place is a mystery to me. I get filled with self-digust over my prose after five hundred words - not for its clumsiness, or pretentiousness, or artful disguise of personality, but for its ease. I feel like a homeless person with the world’s best crescent wrench. No plumbing in my cardboard box. Nor am I looking for sinks and toilets to fix right now, so what am I doing with this weblog, aside from offering some entertainment to friends? Here’s where the plumbing metaphors threaten to clog up. Which is apt for a novel that opens in the Phillipines, where most everything smells a little bit like sewage and grey water. After a few days you get used to it, that faint stench that only strong air conditioning keeps at bay. But who’s thinking of that, when you’re running through the alleyway, hoping for a jeepney that will get you the hell away from those guys? You duck around the sheets and run out onto Edsa Boulevard. A bright green jitney cab with the name Peireira blazoned across the open door in back passes by, so on you jump. Scraps of English, Tagalog jokes, a magandan hapon or two. You squeeze in between two civil servants and stuff the boxers inside a jacket pocket.

Okay, now the guy’s on his way to Makati in a jeepney. This is, in fact, a stupid decision, because it’s a Friday afternoon and the streets are packed with cabs, trucks, compact Japanese cars, slum dwellers hawking cheap Chinese goods between the lanes (not there are any lanes to speak of). Traffic cops lean on their vans by the most crowded intersections, looking not to direct traffic but to pick up a few pesos or US dollars from anyone who looks like they can pay. At the second light the pursuers jump on the jeepney, kick him around, take the boxers. I had to find a way to get rid of the underwear. Exit pursued by a natheless.

CHAPTER 2

As he lay on the floor of the vehicle, his suit jacket imprinted with a dusty Nike footprint, he found himself thinking, highly incongruously, about Tori Spelling’s career. What was she working on now that Beverly Hills was over? A series of Movies of the Week, a couple of direct-to-video erotic thrillers? Was she hosting a series of specials? Two weeks ago, flipping through the Mexican soap operas dubbed into Tagalog and the ubiquitous CNN broadcasts, he’d caught a few minutes of a crime drama starring Spelling and some guy from L.A. Law. What did other actors think, standing there on a set, trading scripted lines back and forth with Tori Spelling? It must be strange, because no matter what emotions you’re expected to call on, no matter what lines you mouth in the service of your character, you have to ignore how ugly she is. Every self-aware actor working with her must be thinking: “This is Aaron Spelling’s daughter. Therefore I must never betray my incredulity, not by casually dropped offstage line or by involuntary twitch, that her face appears to be staring at me through a fisheye lens”. Why not, thought the man on the jeepney floor with the footprint on his jacket and the sympathy of two civil servants, turn Tori Spelling into a figurehead ruler, a transnational monarch, a poster girl the modern world? The paragon of power triumphant over all other considerations. Plus, she appears to be capable of staring in two directions at once, so the “Tori is watching You” posters and pamphlets will pack additional punch. He began to make elaborate plans in his head until he noticed that he was bleeding.

CHAPTER 3

Some days are better than others, he thought.

a nupdate

Regarding Perdido Street Station, which I predicted would spawn a sequel real soon: there's is a sequel, another 800-page fatty that I will probably read. But for Christ's sake, Meaville: I want to write a novel as well, buddy, and if you keep dumping out these hay bales, where am I going to find the time?

Regarding The Lotus' entries on my kissing style or the high regard in which she holds me: Really, she is too kind. I am an ugly man, fish-belly white and surrounded by a pillow of my own grotesque flab. One of my legs is a sort of stump with an articulated flipper at the end, good only for stirring up bathwater. I live in a jar and travel around the world in the cargo hold of FedEx planes. But I have the nicest eyes.

Regarding the States: go visit Seastreet for a sober take on that brutal mess of an election. As a nation fulminates on voter rolls and Diebold and GOP dirty tricks, Seastreet swivels around and looks at the Democratic campaign. Yes, I'm sure that Democrat voters in their thousands were turned away or intimidated or had their votes meddled with by the magic touch-screen machines of Diebold - but come on, people. A close race? A mannequin like Bush shouldn't get more than five hundred votes in the first place. The booths should have been swamped, drowned, utterly saturated with pissed-off citizens working together to get rid of that pisshead and his syndicate. But clearly enough people felt that the alternative simply wasn't good enough. And that's all the Republicans needed - just enough people. Ah well. I'm betting that 2006 will see a backlash against the GOP. Anyone for backlash in '06?

six weeks of looking at pieces of paper

I’ve been reading: Some Books. I’ve been reading Some Books because the movies and televisions insist on speaking foreign languages. They speak French, German, Spanish. The people go around speaking Allegmanisch, Wallonian, Flemish, Provencal, but the TVs keep the mainstream languages flowing nicely. Behind the walls of Europe people murmur their dialects as the electronics squawk in tongues. So yeah. I didn’t get to watch much TV in Europe. But I read Some Books. And here they are.

The day before I left I walked into Buzzword Books and asked Gord to recommend something. He handed me William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which has a lousy cover but turned out be one of those books that you read feverishly, one of those books that you spend the entire day thinking about, one that you are so impatient to return to that meals and work and conversation becomes an irritant, pointless filler. Why, I kept thinking, am I sitting here talking to this [European citizen] when I could be sitting at a café or in my hotel room reading my book? Even basic hygiene began to tax my patience. You can’t read a book in the shower. You can’t read a book and shave at the same time (without severe injury). I experimented with simultaneous reading and toothbrushing, with limited success. If Boyd’s novel had been another few hundred pages I would have given up on ablutions altogether and given over my body to its basic tendency to make men smell like goats. I would have been the Shaggy Canadian frightening the children of Europe. They would have cowered in their highchairs in all the Autogrills of France, all the Little Chefs of Britain, all the Valks of Holland. The fever and concentration with which I approached Any Human Heart reminded me of my reading habits of childhood, when I would sit in the doorway of my bedroom after my parents had turned off my light, and read by the light of the hallway. When my parents’ footsteps sounded too close to the base of the stairs I would leap up with my book, run across the room to my bed and pretend to sleep. Hmmm. I’m sure they couldn’t have heard the sudden thumps from upstairs and the squeak of bedsprings. Later I discovered that a small flashlights would allow me to read under the covers, but nothing felt quite as comfortable as my old habit of reading in the doorway, positioning my body between the uprights, one foot for a brace and the book tilted to catch the light properly.

If anyone’s curious about Any Human Heart– because I haven’t mentioned one word about its content – I will gladly lend it to you. Serious callers only. Limited time offer. No reasonable request refused. Void where prohibited.* In accordance with federal, provincial and municipal laws. Held over three big weeks!**

*By which I mean to say: Defecate in Public Places.
** Remember when movies were held over in theatres? E.T. hung around for months in 1982, just sucking people into theatres like they were strands of spaghetti. In the papers the ads would proclaim, “Held over two more weeks!” as if they were live productions. Now movies just persist or vanish.

Instead of flying direct to Amsterdam from Toronto, we stopped briefly in Heathrow to switch from Air Canada to British Midlands. As far as I can tell, the hour flight to Amsterdam on BMI is a kind of reward for the gruelling ten hours on Air Canada. If you ever fly international on Air Canada, do not opt for the vegetarian meal. You will get your food served twenty minutes before the carts come creaking down the aisle, but the food tastes like piping hot moist cardboard. Or freezing cold but somehow damp cardboard. You can’t outsmart Air Canada into satisfying your needs or giving you a pleasant experience. They’ve been around way too long for that. Anyway. At Heathrow I bought three books: Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog, China Meaville’s Perdido Street Station and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.

First on my reading list – after Any Human Heart betrayed me by ending – was Meaville’s big fatty of a novel. I tell you, Meaville can not turn down an adjective. Or an opportunity to use words like “beguile” and “judder”. He’s like the guy down the street who ends up with an empty garage because he can’t say no to the neighbours who come over to borrow his tools. Run from Perdido Street Station before the adjectives catch on and come after you. The most frustrating thing about the book is its reliance on plot, such that you can’t put the book down because you need to know what happens next. So you slog through the swamp of adjectives, ford the waist-deep river of archaic verbs, just to see what comes after. What comes after is an inconclusive ending that will almost certainly get its sequel. Which I will read with gritted teeth and a cup of coffee. Mmmm, gritted teeth. It’s like cream of wheat with more calcium.

After eight hundred pages of Meaville’s bring-this-man-an-editor prose, I was grateful that Martin Amis was next on my list. And this was not just any Amis – this was Yellow Dog, the novel that had Tibor Fischer howling with derision, the one that just about everyone agrees hits the depths of depravity. The nadir of Amis’ talent and the squandering of his gifts. The novel that draws on an empty well of the spirit and comes up with a bucket of muck and worms. Yeah, well, I liked it, even though the complaints are justified. Yellow Dog doesn’t really feel like a novel so much as a bunch of collated notes for a longer, more substantial book. Or maybe several books. There’s a story about a successful modern middle-class man whose violent past hits him on the head and transforms him, by dint of a brain injury, into a yob with a conscience, a primitive fighting a rearguard action against his atavistic instincts. Which may be a good way to describe the novel: a text that takes a prurient interest in pornography and incest but keeps stepping back to examine itself instead of diving in wholeheartedly. Instead of gratifying desire, Amis seems to enjoy wallowing in desire’s repulsiveness. The result is all titillation, a striptease of a book, a porn movie in which everybody sits down to dinner instead of having sex.

Interleaved with the A-plot is the risible tale of the Englands, a fictitious Royal Family who end up embroiled in a sex-tape scandal. Perhaps this bit was allegorical, perhaps it was supposed to suspenseful or maybe even funny, but I didn’t waste time on piercing its veil. Complications ensue, other characters do other things, an airplane full of smokers comes screaming across the sky, eventually the whole thing ends. I left the novel in a hotel in southern France for the next off-season guest.

Enough for today? I think so. Next up on the Palinode Review Revue: Middlesex; Oryx & Crake; Snow Crash; The DaVinci Code.

You go, dentures!

Some guy on the radio is telling me that he and some unspecified others are not going to sit in silence, they're not going to live in fear. How long is that song going to infest the airwaves? I find it unsettling when the bagpipes kick in and it becomes clear that this is some Anglo-Saxon call to battle, but to battle what? Silence and fear? What does it mean to battle silence and fear? Where? To what end? To whose benefit, aside from filling the trenchcoat pockets of that singer? Do I battle silence whenever I order a beer or phone out for Thai food? Do I battle fear when I steal someone's place in a queue? If that guy's not going to make it clear, I'm just going to fight my battles wherever I can.

I can't even remember when that song came out. It must have appeared somewhere around '89-'91, when pop music really became infected by that messianic strain of power ballad, with Elton John professing his Belief In Love and Michael Jackson using a lot of dry ice to perform his Earth Song. Remember when protest songs protested something specific? When singers took a few syllables out of their verses to drop some choice names or places? I wonder if it's possible to trace the mutation of the pop protest song into the Affirmation Song? If I had to pick a watershed ("Oooh, I think I'll take that nice watershed with the recling chairs and the rotating jets") for the shift from genuine protest to airy encouragement, I'd vote for Band Aid. You know something's wrong when the short answer to "Do They Know It's Christmas" is "Yes, Mr. Geldof und Freunden, European colonial powers not only fractured a number of self-organized African societies into unstable but politically malleably nation-states, they also introduced traditional Christian holidays, so yeah, they know it's Christmas, you condescending gang of fucks". Neal Ascheron mentions in a recent article in the New York Review of Books that we seem to need the horror and degradation of Africa to fuel our ever-diminishing stores of shock and compassion. We don't need to take action; we just need its resonant call. As for the American version of Band Aid, "We Are The World" was probably guilty of pushing Michael Jackson over into the abyss of insanity.

Now Lisa Stansfield is telling me that she's been around the world and she, she, she can't find her baby. Worse, it's a live performance and people are applauding. Who applauds that kind of crap? Why not go out and applaud road pylons or sun-faded For Sale notices on hardware store windows? Why not applaud a snappy tweed skirt and matching blouse? Why not go wild with hooting and cheering for a set of dentures in a ditch?

Right then. I'm off to find some false teeth I can really put my faith in.

when it matters

Last night I discovered what British people do when they want leisurely passage to their European vacations. They take a ferry, land in Belgium/France/Holland, and proceed to buy up all the booze that Europe can produce. How is it that continental Europe has any alcohol to spare for its own cafes and bars? Why aren't the brasseries and Gasthauser deserted and dry? At the Zeebrugge docks I watched Brit car after Brit car open its trunk to reveal the cases of Stella or hard spirits. And once onboard they didn't stop, buying massive amounts on the Pride of Bruges. Britain: drinking Europe dry.

from the heart of the Meuse Valley come exhausted Canadians

It's nice to be sitting around in the old section of Brussels, because we just spent several days in what has to be the ugliest shit that Western Europe has to offer. Certainly, there are parts of Eastern Europe that look like huge industrial middens with cities plopped on top of them, but the Meuse Valley offers some serious competition. It's a thirty kilometre-long fart, the rancid body gasses of capitalism exhaling all the way to Huy from the back end of Liege. I can't recall, offhand, ever seeing so many nuclear reactors jockeying for space with chemical dye factories and whatnot. I'll tell you all about it when I get home in five days. Five days! Five days. A quick trip through England and then it's home for me. And you will all get to look at my photographs, the online version of the family vacation slide show.

Until then, content yourself with the fact that western Austrians translate 'backyard' as 'backside,' so if you're quick you can get there soon and have a glass of fresh apple juice from someone's backside. I sure did.

austria, I rename thee

Austria, let me dip into your history and rename you Curse of Austria. I spent a week in your Alps, respecting your strange high-altitude customs and walking-stick ways, and nothing went right. Every morning came with a dismaying message, a customs issue, a sick/lazyass interpreter, an inacessible laundromat three towns away, a dialect of German so frightening that the rest of the continent dropped it circa 1500, an expert who consulted brochures during his interview, a heavy fog that descended from the clouds just as we reached the helicopter - and worst of all, utterly bloodless interviewees, survivors of an avalanche that took away their homes and families, from whose voices and eyes no emotion ever slipped. How did I emerge alive? Why am I not dead right now, a crushed mush of pulp under a downed helicopter (we went up a couple of days later), a bit of goo in a crinkled Saab, a weeping wounded mess in a Rankweil gasthaus downing Mohren Brau and pissing off the locals (not dead but good as)? How did I survive and escape to sweet civilized smokestacked Stuttgart? Oh full-day rush hour, oh jammed autobahnkreutz, oh Japanese businessmen and efficient business Englishspeak, I missed you, even you I missed, oh yes.

a rundown

Highly idiosyncratic summary of where I've been and what I've seen:

Long-legged flies tasting tablecloths in Triberg, Germany. The houseflies here have longer legs and it unnerves me.

A run of Playmobil-looking sculptures along the highways between Lyon and Marseilles. Bright elves engaged in acrobatics for our amusement. What for?

Graded clouds sloping into valleys in Vorarlberg. They look like gigantic arrows pointing at hotels and bars.

Citroens and Mercedes trucks plugging along mountain roads.

A roomful of helicopter pilots in heavy red coveralls drinking espressos at a helicopter hangar high up in the Alps.

My time's up.

wenn ich 'Kultur' höre

TALKING WITH THE TEUTONS

Here's a conversation I had with a Swiss border guard yesterday:

Guard: "Guten Tag. Longgermanword, bitte schön".
Palinode: "Bitte nochmal?"
Guard: "Longgermanword and Evenlongerone, bitte".
Palinode: "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"
Guard: (without missing a beat)"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

(A pause in which you can feel the international tensions build. A long line of cars stretches out behind our rented Saab into the Schwarzwald mist. Ahead, the steel and concrete public works of Switzerland wait patiently for my long-dead bureaucratic German to sit up at its desk and produce the correct terms.)

Palinode: "Paßkarte?"
Guard: "Bitte schön".

(Then my German sits up straight and starts pulling the right files. I explain who we are, where we're going and why, discovering in the process that the phrase 'Direkttransit' transcends languages and produces the desired 'please proceed' gesture, that lazy twirling finger indicating the Autobahn and the whole of Austria. We drive off, having satisfied the Swiss customs people that we can be trusted to drive through their country and into Austria without causing any trouble or poisoning the Bodensee or anything like that. On our way through St. Gallen we stop briefly to poison the Bodensee.)

ON BEING FOREIGN

Since I began travelling for a living I've been to a number of places around the world, but Germany and Austria are the only places in which I've felt like a foreigner. People stare at us with curiosity and sometimes hostility, dogs single us out for barking, shopkeepers refuse to understand my German. At first I thought that my Deutsch was far worse than I'd imagined, but after a few halting and friendly conversations with various folks, I realized that some people here aren't interested in understanding me. It's as simple as that. They hear the foreign tones in my voice (or the Turkish cast of my skin?) and their faces shut down.

Worse than that is the low-grade paranoia that these places engender. In Holland we were treated with courtesy, in France with apathy, but in Germany we were watched. No kidding. One Sunday morning we went out filming in a neighbourhood of Ludwigshafen (right across the Rhein from Mannheim) and a middle-aged man in a leather jacket kept an eye on us, affecting a casual air that failed to convince after ninety minutes. Yes, for an entire Sunday morning this anonymous German citizen had nothing better to do than stand on street corners and pretend that he wasn't following us around. There must be a German word for this. "The pleasure derived from pretending to be a secret policeman around foreign film crews". Stupid self-appointed self-policing freaks. I took pictures of him whenever he glanced at us.

Maybe he was a secret policeman. On sleepy Sunday duty.

for some

For some, love comes suddenly and dies instantly. For others, internet access behaves like that.

things to see in europe if you're me

Chickens furtively crossing the road in the tiny 900 year old town of Ouiwekirk. They peek out from behind shrubs and take off over the brick-paved streets. Once they're safely on the other side they look disappointed.

Windmills. Endless freaking fields of windmills.

Naked (topless) ladies on the beaches of southern France. I didn't stop to investigate, but you know, I saw naked ladies.

A Turkish man in a city in Northern France, shouting insults at me and Greg because he thought we were Dutch. He shook his finger at us as we drove by while his friends pointed at our Netherlands license plate.

Frejus, southern France: Set behind a modern metal bookshelf in a town hall office, an old wooden door inlaid with iron. We open the door and find ourselves in an annex built in the thirteenth century, with a spiral staircase leading to the roof.

A blackberry bush growing by Roman ruins. We pick a few. I learn and instantly forget the French word for blackberry.

The remains of a gigantic concrete dam set in the mountains of Provence. Chunks of pink concrete the size of station wagons are scattered for miles along the dry riverbed. Pieces of iron rebar half an inch thick bend out in spaghetti-like curves from the concrete chunks. A huge rusted bolt sticks out from the ground as if it's got some purpose in being there.

A crowd, a swarm of people massing in front of a pizzeria in Cannes, waiting for the glassy-eyed doorman to snap into life and usher people inside. TV industry execs, lost documentarians, brittle-boned models with eggshell faces, shift their weight back and forth. According to those who know, this is the best pizza to be had in southern France. Amazingly, we get a seat on the patio in ten minutes. Every twenty minutes someone gets hit by a motorcycle, screams obscenities in any one of a dozen languages, then keeps on walking. The pizza's nothing special.

That's all I've seen over the last couple of weeks. The rest of the time I've kept my eyes clamped shut for fear of meeting the eyes of Europeans, whose basilisk gaze will turn your heart to brittle glass. No, really, it's true.

it's true

when they say that French waiters are rude. Tonight I had a guy who decided not to understand my serviceable French, not to understand my mush-mouthed and idiosyncratic English, and instead chose to hector us over our choice of bun and switch our salads back and forth until not even we could decide if the 'Salade Marina' had the shrimp. Whatever salad I ordered turned out to be draped in bacon and cream cheese.

The good thing about dealing with crap waiters and foodstuffs that always, always contain internal organs is that I'm doing it in the south of France. And damn, is it ever nice here. It's disorienting to go in less than 48 hours from the near-frigid winds blowing off the Oosterschelde to an off-season resort with a seaside view, but it's, you know, the good kind of disorientation. I'm not going to tell you about the first hotel we checked into, with its standard of service that would make a barracks inviting, but I will tell you that I found an old contact lens in the BUNK bed in which I spent one comatose night by the A8 motorway between Fréjus and Cannes.