woodcabin

+ i admit that i've been trying for months to compute life in a small town. i would love to live in lilooet. it's beautiful. there's one grocery. several pubs. an incredibly stark landscape. i don't know if i could live in a small town, but i am interested in trying it.

but to leave the city would feel like a retreat. the city is ground zero. for everything. 80% of canadians live in cities. i get giddy when i go downtown, because i live in vancouver. i LIVE here. the most liveable city in the world. i identify with it as my home. this is where i live. so much needs to be resolved here, in any city, and to leave, no matter how wonderfully appealing, feels like giving up. just abandoning what seems to be my generation's most urgent focus.

+ does riding a bicycle change anything? if it changes anything, anything at all, even my own awareness of simple changes in the grade of familliar streets, does it matter? it's a mode of local transportation that i really enjoy. maybe that's what matters. i was reading about thomas kinkade, painter of light, which threw me back into all sorts of philosophy of art, which is why, interestingly, i'm curious about my bicycle.

+ i did very little reading today. i spent most of the day feeling guilty about not having typed up minutes for my co-op before our board meeting this evening. then i realised that the quick way to get over it all was to just type up the minutes and send them out. so i did. i felt better.

+activities that i enjoy on a daily basis:

• making coffee. assembling my french press, grinding beans, plunging the grounds.
  
• drinking coffee. at home and elsewhere.
  
• doing dishes. if i can accomplish nothing else, i can do this. it is deeply satisfying and visceral.
  
• reading the newspaper. any newspaper. whenever i go to another town i buy a copy of the daily newspaper and track down any local weeklies.
  

+ here is a photo of the last canadian:

we can build the dream with love

+ i am now in three courses for the fall. hist 350 - history of the ottoman empire, hist 485 - special topics: atlantic canada, and hist 485 - special topics: history of the animal protection movement. i will be on campus tuesday and thursday, and at harbour centre friday.

+ i've started drinking stella artois, which is quite a shift from the india pale ales i was fixated on for most of the summer. it started several weeks ago when we went to my mother's house for dinner and stopped at the 148th and 108th liquor store. it was bud, molson, or stella, so i got stella. it is a nice, bright beer. pleasant. i think i'll but more tomorrow and spend most of the day sitting on the patio reading and drinking beer.

+ i'm reading don delillo's libra at long last and it's making me dizzy it's so good. i got money this week, and went out and bought a lot of books. a list:

• the last canadian, which is a pulp novel from the '70s. there was no synopsis, but the cover is an image of a single figure trudging across a vast expanse of snow, with the word TERRIFYING! in the top left and the title in red. the last canadian. i'm very excited.
  
• end zone, by don delillo, which i've read before. good, but formative. mike hingston was right about the wonderful wonderful football game.
  
• election 2004, by the staff of newsweek. this is just 200 pages of sheer election porn. it's all bite-size campaign analysis and narrative construction. total porn.
  
• heart of the cariboo-chilcotin, short stories and tales. i'll read this when we go camping past lilooet.
  
• power, a popular-politics book about power generation and distribution in canada. it looks ominous, i.e. bad things are afoot!
  
• public power, another book about power generation and distribution in canada, focused on public ownership. it was written by the leader of the ontario NDP as a campaign prop in 2003.
  
• a pile of textbooks, which i'll document another day.
  

+ while camping, i finished douglas coupland's generation x and read sharon butala's the gates of the sun as well as the orange r, by nobody in particular, and decision at delphi, by helen macinnes. the latter was lovely. international espionage, kinda, but more interested in history, ideology, and the deadly consequences of situational ethics in wartime. the ending is a let down, but the first three quarters are a magnificent slow build of resentments, old politics, and nihlism. nilhlism! the orange r was pretty bad. it's a didactic cautionary tale about nuclear power, but while i was hoping for some juicy gore and mutant-exploitation, i only got a grade-nine PSA about solar power and overcoming prejudice. blah. gates of the sun is better than luna, by far, but different enough from the fourth archangel so as to defy easy comparison. i liked it a lot.

+ camping was really wonderful. we spent the first night at skihist, a provincial park above lytton, but relocated for the next three days to a forestry campsite on the other side of lilooet. it was free and gorgeous. we were right on cayoosh creek, which we used to rinse dishes, make coffee, and keep beer cold. lilooet was a home base; we went back and forth several times, also to the bc hydro campground at seton dam for free firewood. i made a series of lovely fires. we ate well. everything was beautiful.

+ not sure what i'll do this fall. i'm feeling compelled by many factors to get back into student society politics and, to an extent, i never left it. i don't want it. i want to read and drink beer. i can do that all fall, so long as the books i read are textbooks. then again, it's something that i'm good at, and that i really enjoy. i am quite certain that, at this point, i deeply regret not running for re-election in the spring.

+ it's too late now to keep reading, so i'll just have to do it in the morning. i've got a whole week left.

almost gothic

this morning i slept in, listened to gordon lightfoot while doing crossword puzzles and drinking coffee, and then switched to steely dan to do dishes. then i did another crossword puzzle and drank more coffee until amanda and gar came over and we all had a stella artois. now i'm reading and waiting for laundry, still listening to steely dan. i have six straight hours of steely dan on my computer. it's nice to have friends over in the afternoon for beer.

tonight i plan to watch a three hour documentary about the siege of stalingrad, called, simply, stalingrad. last night i watched game 6, written by don delillo. i liked it. it's about baseball, essentially. all sorts of hallmarks: a burst steam pipe with asbestos lining, leading to men in hazmat suits in the street. studious repetition of dialogue, including a crucial bit in the-play-within-the-movie. lists. casual references to extreme and inappropriate violence. close analysis of baseball-as-life. is it a good film? i couldn't really tell. i was just focused on the words, the language. i'm still hoping to start reading libra on monday, after my last exam is finished. we're still hoping to get away, probably north to quesnel or so. i'd like to take the fraser canyon, but not the fraser valley. we'll probably take the sea-to-sky up to pemberton, then across through lilooet to cache creek where we'll turn north.

terms that i defined and explained the significance of for my world war II exam last tuesday:
- atomic diplomacy
- spanish civil war
- lebensraum
- neville chamberlain
- anti-semitism.

it was a week ago that i went to washington with my dad. we went to spokane for a baseball game. it was family feast night: $1 hot dogs. i had three, along with two kokanees. after the game we went to a gas station, bought beer, and drank it until 1 a.m. while arguing about philosophies of art. is it the process? the intention? the artifact itself? the next morning we went to coeur d'alene in idaho, nearly got lost on the way to elk, and then had mexican for lunch in grand coulee. we didn't get a tour of the grand coulee dam, but we did spend nearly an hour in the interpretative visitors' centre. everything about the grand coulee dam is cool. i learned so much! we passed through a forest fire near omak and came back through the skagit river valley.

i don't really want to leave the house today, except to walk around the park. there's so much to read at home! and beer! and food! and stalingrad! i'll make a caesar salad for dinner.

rounds

last night i read a good 400 pages of articles about world war II. the subject areas i covered:

• life in the third reich - the war years, 1939-1945
  
• german occupation policy, part I - germany's new order
  
• german occupation policy part II - life under the rule of germany and its allies
  
• the "final solution" - 1941-1945
  

I read a 30 page article about intentionalist v. functionalist interpretations of the final solution.

now i'm drinking gin and tonics, waiting for jan to come back from a membership committee meeting so that we can go out for dinner.

tomorrow morning i should be going on a two-day road trip to spokane with my father to see a baseball game, but we haven't confirmed. i imagine that he will just show up tomorrow morning. we've got a scenic route mapped out through norrth-central washington. we'll be able to stop by the grand coulee dam on the way back.