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.