fender telecaster

+ if the condo in whistler was my camp david, and port alberni became my western white house, what was portland, oregon to me in 2009? sian said, at one point, "i dunno... i'm kinda tired of portland,' and i understood but still felt it, the moment passing. my bookshelves as living souvenirs. the chronicle and memoir in-and-of themselves. and my solution to various situations has, increasingly, been larger and less organized piles of books.

+ the narrative force, day to day and week to week and month to month. i hated high fidelity, i really did, maybe my least favourite book of 2009, but i'll ape the stupid line anyway: am i where i am because i read novels or do i read novels because of where i am? the simple math of it says that i read more novels now than i once did. but this is the frog in boiling water.

novels as treats, parceled and hidden. six in a row is some sort of narrative binge, too much to handle. but i am still learning how to read. travel writing is memoir and history, and memoir is just history anyway.

+ in tofino, channel 48 on our hotel tv was a fixed image of something, maybe outdoors, a security camera? completely static, no movement. and cancon hits - when we first found it they were playing rush, 'time stand still.' olympic curling on the tv while i played rush, 'time stand still' over and over on youtube. my laptop on a wireless connection.

on our last day we drove into town for a sandwich and coffee before driving back out across the island and we saw it, the scene by daylight, a dock on the sound.

tofino was a fishing town, a logging town, and that's still there. radar hill was part of the distant early warning system, the pinetree line, the last line of defense. a military outpost. the park signs are still brown and yellow - a lonely national park sign on our beach, cox bay, brown and yellow, bilingual. a hike on a boardwalk through the rainforest to the beach.

+ before the olympics, in january, the newspaper ran a page on the security plans, the escalating zones of coverage. colour-coded yellow-orange-red. concentric circles of destruction, how many dead instantly, how many dead in days from radiation, how many dead over months and years from contaminated everything and them how many more dead over decades. concentric circles of fallout.

the same situation

+ i think i knew that joan didion was specifically referenced in court and spark - the book, about court and spark - the album. but i didn't consider that when i started to think about joan didion while listening to joni mitchell, when i listened to the hissing of summer lawns while washing dishes. joan didion comes up with trouble child, well, of course - 'breaking like the waves at malibu.'

it is now impossible for me to read anything of joan didion's without using the year of magical thinking as a lens, as a final rejoinder to being dismissed as distant or removed. she wrote herself into all of it, in and out of her subjects and i use the year of magical thinking to focus. but i use it on more than that - i use it as a frame, the point you will arrive at and the place that i need to keep in mind.

i only pose ann patchett's truth and beauty against joni mitchell, court and spark, joan didion, and california because i happened to read it in sequence. and not even by design, but because i happened to listen to the hissing of summer lawns while washing dishes. but truth and beauty does not even go to california - it moves from iowa to tennessee to boston and to new york again and again. (and joan didion goes between new york and california.) but more than anything else i read truth and beauty as a book about writing. and, on writing, as a counterpoint to the smug winking shit of bookmark now, unfortunately subtitled writing in unreaderly times. it is the boho dance again, "the virtue of your style inscribed on your contempt for mine." just a series of distancing devices - "artists in noble poverty / a little lace along the seams." bookmark now made me want to stop writing but truth and beauty changed that. i guess joan didion changed that too.

but the year of magical thinking and truth and beauty are both about grief - they both start with a death. joan didion works away from the moment while ann patchett works towards it.

i read court and spark while listening to court and spark and thinking about joan didion, but people's parties puts me right back into truth and beauty. subtitled 'a friendship,' and it is that but also more. "going to people's parties, fumbling deaf dumb and blind."

i've posed california and bob dylan as things i would never understand, parts of the world that my life was complete without tackling. but i re-situate court and spark, an album i've been listening to since i was twelve and have heard since i was born, in california, and in joan didion, and between mcgovern's defeat and the resignation of richard nixon. after the carpenters sang at nixon's inauguration, it all fell apart. on the morning after the sixties.

olympic village

+ two things happened this week. the canada line, the new skytrain line opened and tamara taggart co-hosted 'live with regis' in new york city.

on wednesday i took the canada line, the R-A-V line, the new skytrain line. i took it from waterfront to YVR-airport to broadway-city hall, from olympic village to vancouver-city centre. i walked out of waterfront station and through the looking glass. i had to take the canada line, the new skytrain line, to believe that it was there.

my parents had a house in richmond, a house where they lived before i was born. 'the house on 4 road.' richmond, a city that existed before me but has never existed since. i don't even know what richmond is but i know that richmond is where my dad went to high school.

in 2001 or 2002 i stood behind tamara taggart in line at calendar club. calendar club opened up in pacific centre every year from october to january. i was buying canadian art calendars at %75 off and tamara taggart was trying to return a board game without a receipt.

vancouver is a world-class city, the polls are consistent and insistent, the most livable city in the world. the best city in which to work. 85,000 people took the canada line, the new skytrain line, for free on opening day. the wait was 2 1/2 hours at waterfront station. 150 minutes. i live in the world's most livable city.

i had dinner and got back on to the canada line at olympic village station. there was nobody there, no one in the station, no one on the street outside the station. cars driving past on 2nd avenue.

tamara taggart lives in yaletown. tamara taggart lives in "kits." tamara taggart has parents that live in coal harbour.

vancouver is the only city in canada with a direct rapid-transit link to the airport.

tamara taggart has friends that compare their times on the grouse grind. she went to new york for 'live with regis' because she won a contest.

we hate the expo line, the old skytrain, the first skytrain, the only skytrain. it goes to surrey from downtown vancouver and, unfortunately, back the other way again. kids smoking pot on a packed train coming back from the fireworks, between columbia and scott road stations.

my sister and i would ride our bikes to surrey place mall, where i would buy cds at a&b sound. before surrey central station, before sfu.

on monday, the canada line was on the cover of the 24. on friday, tamara taggart was on the cover of the 24. three weeks ago i was on the cover of the 24, holding a sign that said "they lied."

one other thing happened this week. coors light was forced to take down billboards that mocked toronto. "colder than a person from toronto." toronto wanted to host the 2008 olympic games, but lost. we won.

the first time tamara taggart went to new york was this week, to co-host 'live with regis.' we are the first canadian city with a direct rapid-transit link to the airport. not even toronto has a direct rapid transit link to the airport.

panamax

+ they built a new fence and the smell of the wood in the rain.

+ and i go to a restaurant down the street, i order lunch and a beer. i eat, then order another beer, then see the board in front - someone i knew is listed on the bill, there is an event. someone i knew when i was much younger, another person. i had plans to have a third beer, finish my book, but i pay the bill and go. i bring home a case of beer, and read my book, alone. i finish my book the next day.

+ the skytrain station is rebuilt, week by week, and i, week by week, forget what it was the week before. and years ago, as an outpost. the skytrain line, a spine of landmarks across the region and the only spine i know, a frame for the city.

fern taught me how to eat chinese noodles at penny restaurant. she had a secret piece of paper with secret chinese characters that she would show to the waitress, who would bring us vermicelli with beef and green onions. this is now i learned to eat chinese noodles.

and this spring i ate chinese noodles on my own, every day, most days. across the street, close to where i worked, not far from where i live, on a street i knew and still know.

fern taught me to walk through the city, how to walk across the city from pacific centre to commercial drive, from mall to mall. and they became my poles, a new city, down pender from granville, across to venables and commercial.

where i live now as just another piece, filling in the gaps of the city. between bus routes, bike routes. lists and maps.

the greatest hits of all time

+ i have two draft posts, archived from may and march, barely fleshed out and not even pre-formed. i asked, earlier, years ago, who am i then, when i do not write, for months at a time.

i spent three horrible evenings archiving my day-to-day from 2000-2003. i kept an online journal through my first two years at SFU, and, fittingly, i trailed off when i ran for office in 2003. now i've made a series of backups, the complete transcription, typos uncorrected, and have taken the original document off of the internet. i read it all and, well, is this who i am? no, it is who i was, and that is ok, it is what it is.

one draft is the set up for an extended piece titled "how i learned to eat chinese noodles" and it was only today that i realised that this was an unconscious revision of an old project, a personal geography of the lower mainland as told through a guide to sushi restaurants that i have eaten at. i worked my chinese noodle piece out in my head for days on the campaign and ultimately exhausted it. the core was a note that i was now using a skytrain station that, for years, i had been unable to place, with any certainty, in a vancouver that i understood. i learned to eat chinese noodles at penny restaurant on hastings at lakewood, which is how i learned what lakewood drive was.

i have been ruminating over an extended piece on the subject of my boss as a reformed mass murderer.

+ if i do this to track changes, the shifts and perspectives, then here: i have been listening to bob dylan all week. i read nixonland, 20 pages in i needed to get inside and pulled up what i had in itunes from 1966. which was simon and garfunkel, really, in terms of american records at least. so, wikipedia, what else came out in 1966? i get records by jefferson airplane, the rolling stones, the doors, the byrds, tim hardin, the monks, buffalo springfield, jimi hendrix. and bob dylan. and i spent years not listening to dylan, the cultural weight was too much, a shell of everybody, always - you need to listen to this, this is genius, this is as good as it gets - and i can't even cope with this. give me space, let me find this if i do on my own timeline. but i can't stop playing it now. i guess i understand, at last.

+ what i did here i now do, in part, in semesterly book lists. but it's not enough.

a favourite author

+ i have my own michael ignatieff story. we were leaving parliament hill, november 2007, me and james, amanda, haida, i think that was it. we were at question period, now we were leaving, back across the river to gatineau and our little conference. michael ignatieff was leaving too, big coat, handbag, no hat. we were next to the big holiday tree, hey, it's ignatieff! cool. we went out separate doors, but took the same path down towards the street, the same gate, and then walked right behind him down the road. he recognised some guy, hey, hi, they waved. we all kept walking, then he went into the chateau laurier hotel before we had a chance to really deal with the situation. but that's the story.

my dog will run to catch a duck or a seagull, and it flies away - these are the rules. she caught one, cornered it on a bench, it had a bum wing or something, and she looked at it, then left. i mean really, when do you do then? and we caught the next prime minister, wow, walking down the street. he was handsome. the eyebrows, they're real, it's not just makeup.

+ the globe and mail runs a column called 'generation ex', an advice and analysis column for divorcees. it was introduced with the new 'life' section. given the continuously high divorce rates in canada, went the pitch, surely there is a need for some conversation on this, particularly in a time when the wedding industry can sustain magazines and conferences and its own subculture - i saw a poster for an 'indie wedding fair' in town recently. so, 'generation ex,' still running. i skim it, sometime read it all.

and something a friend said, that he had, over time, felt a quiet jealousy from other friends over the fact that his parents were happily married and stable, which was rare. i remember, in elementary school, feeling as though, living as i did in a stable two-parent household, that i was missing out on a defining aspect of my generation, my peer group. the 'single-parent-household' felt like the norm, and i couldn't understand, didn't dare wonder further. i was missing out on 'generation ex.'

+ we went, four, five years ago, to port alberni for the holidays. my then-estranged parents were in ucluelet, a little lodge or townhouse i guess, for the holidays. a getaway to work things out. of course we'd join them for lunch, how wonderful, we'd drive to ucluelet, then we'd all drive to tofino for a fancy lunch, then a walk on the beach. the mist cleared and there we were, four of us, in front of a wonderful view of everything, the beach and the ocean. and then the perfectly condensed short story, the boiled down image of it all, a couple was getting married in front of us, right on the beach.

on one hand, i've finally joined my peer group, understand what it means to be us, this is the generation ex, and a lot of things make more sense then. on another hand, there you go, it's a capsule story. stable home / broken home. from one to the other. and both columns are so complex, so long and varied and full of, well, people.

the finish line

+ i missed out on the fall, the leaves, longer nights. i guess it came and went and now we are finishing november. i spent the fall inside, on the phone, walking to and from, but it really is the first fall i've spent in vancouver since i left surrey, the first fall at home, the first fall on a one zone bus pass. up victoria drive, back home through the park, up broadway, keep going. i sweep my patio, leaves from the trees and pine needles.

+ and i've run from campaign to campaign, in between i drink coffee in my kitchen and read the newapaper, a novel, do the dishes every afternoon. and i've won everything i've tried my hand at this year, a string of stunning victories, everything is going in the right direction. i get out to watch a hockey game, drink less than before because i'm old now, i'm not drinking in a bar that i own, i'm meeting a friend for a beer to watch the game after work. and then i'm going home, to write, to read. at 10.30, after the game. a pub that i can walk home from, a pub down the street.

+ and i'm already forgetting my week in court, lunch at court, rain all day, on the long glass roof, raining in and around, waiting and waiting. what did i do after we won? oh, right, i went to court. it's like it was in march, it's over now, i'm just numb to the result. of course i wasn't, i wanted to be, and who really knows this time. it's a coda, the surprise epilogue to my novel. my book. you can't drink a coffee in court, so i went back to an espresso, drink it on the skytrain, hope it's enough until lunch.

+ and i'm forgetting how to read, how i used to read for a lifeline, a slice of life on the bus - please don't hassle me, please don't recognise me, just let me read for now before i have to work again, before i'm back at school - i wanted to read so much more. now i have books and i have time and i'm waiting.

+ and this spring, when i had tickets for the train. picking books out for the train, watching the weather. a train through the mountains, cities, the desert. all i needed to keep working, up the hill every day, tickets for the train.

there was a landslide in oregon, the landslide that took out the track, so i bought a plane ticket. i still brought books, but fewer. i'd be in the air for only 8 hours, small layovers, no time at all, really.

+ better government, a positive change, beer all night. where we come from and why we stay up all night, why we forget it all the day after, back to mornings and nights and "what do you do when you're not here?" - well, i'm just here, i'm never not here. divide the city into quadrants, zones, polls, lists of people voting, colours. stay in control; win.