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.