Oklahoma for the holidays

Overnight bus from Montreal to Boston for the hundredth time. Couldn't wait til morning, just had the get the hell out of Dodge (for the thousandth time).

About 4am, White River Junction. I wake up when we stop to pick up some more passengers.

Onto the bus strides a man who looks out of place in Vermont. Big black suede cowboy hat. Leather boots. He stops at the row where I'm sitting and looks at the empty seat next to me.

"Mind if I sit here?". He has an accent that makes him sound like someone from TV trying to sound like a tough cowboy.

He sits next to me. He is wearing a manly fragrance. A sensory distillation of some epiphenomenal esthetic comprised of leather and wood and skies at beginnings and ends of days.

He is simultaneously talkative and terse. "Just lemme know if I'm keepin you awake," he says, and then he keeps me awake, talking softly. Minimalist narrative.

He's heading to Oklahoma, via Manchester then Cincinnati. "My daughter's been fightin with her old man, so she wanted her daddy around for the holidays." It's not clear if he is being summoned for comfort or protection; he doesn't elaborate.

He was a professional rodeo rider. He did two hitches in the service, starting in Vietnam. He has traveled around the country and talks to me about the places we've both been. He speaks so softly I often can't hear him. When he takes off his jacket, I see that he has a tattoo stretching the length and breadth of his forearm. It is dominated by brilliant shades of red: hearts, blood, snakes. The stacked sheets of muscle underneath the image were earned through work, not cultivated.

It is still dark when we stop at the little airport in New Hampshire. He stands and puts on his jacket.

"It was nice talkin to you," he says.

A minute later I watch him walk towards the terminal, shouldering a tightly-packed green canvas duffel bag. We haven't exchange names, so I use this image to mark his place on my list of temporary, unique path crossings.

An hour later, I'm waking up again as we arrive in Boston, this time to dawnlight and the orienting proximity of ocean and remembered architecture. My first thought is to draw some type of contrast in my mind between Christmas spent on horseback in Oklahoma and whatever familiar, illusory refuge awaits me in my equivalent geography.

Reflections upons a temporary medium-term return

Reposted from 19.nov.05 on irrealis

So I'm living in America for a few months. Specifically, in my ville natale, Scituate, MA. I grew up here but moved to Montreal when I was 19 and have lived there ever since (that was about 8.5 years ago).

I consider myself in voluntary exile, so I was a little nervous about coming back here for more than a few days. And I will be honest: the USA has proved as weird as I remember (not that I knew it at the time).

There are commercials for hospitals here; hospitals compete for sick people's "business". There are even more commericals for medications. Apparently, when you get sick, you should turn on the TV and figure out which drugs you should take, then tell your doctor to give you the prescriptions you want (or else, you should inform him or her, you'll be taking your business elsewhere).

I imagine myself in an ambulance, in cardiac arrest, or with an ax lodged in my skull, or with a collapsed lung, trying to communicate with the EMTs to let them know that I don't agree with their choice of hospital, that I'd rather go to the one in the next town over, because the actors they had playing doctors in their commercial seemed much more competent.

I imagine myself getting wheeled into the ER whose marketing team has won me over, shouting orders at doctors, demanding BRAND NAME narcotics, not some generic knock-off.

In the supermarket the other day, I saw calorie-free "creamy bacon" flavour salad dressing. I'm not sure how they remove the calories from bacon and cream; probably in a laboratory with petrochemicals (just a guess).

I imagine myself in an ambulance, having a heart attack, trying to be an informed consumer and let the EMTs know which hospital I want to patronize. I imagine myself in my hospital of choice, ordering my drugs from the doctor. I imagine myself imagining that as soon as I get out, as long as I stick to the calorie-free creamy bacon dressing, everything will be ok.

To be continued (probably).

Helter skeeter

Reposted from 1.jul.05 on irrealis.

A preemptive strike against a mosquito leaves a smudge of someone else's blood on my wall.

Now I'm worried that if some evil befalls one of the neighbours, forensic evidence exists that could be construed as linking my bedroom to the crime.

If you're reading this, please note the date, as you may have to testify at my trial.

I took a job

Reposted from 20.mar.05 on irrealis.

A few years ago, I had been laid off from a fairly low-stress, cushy job. More even than money, I needed to get another job so I could stay in Canada (at that point I hadn't yet officially immigrated as a permanent resident). So after a couple of months of unemployment, I took a job in an awful suburb north of Montreal. The commute was brutal. I didn't have a car, so I took the metro to the end of the line, then took a bus for a long time. It took an hour and a half each way. The office was in a short, square office building. In front of it there was a highway. On the other side of the highway was a shopping mall. Behind the mall was another highway. To the left of the office: a road with more offices. To the right: A bus terminal. My desk was in a crowded, windowless room.

It was the end of winter. Elsewhere this would be spring. Not in an awful suburb north of Montreal.

I made friends with a co-worker who had also just started there. He was from eastern Europe. We had the same middle name. Sometimes at lunch or breaks, he and I would go outside, just to get out of the office. We'd walk around the parking lot, making laps around the building. He'd smoke. Pretty soon, we were deep into April, and we'd go outside for our walks with high expectations. But we were always disappointed. It just never stopped snowing or sleeting and it was always windy and cold. (Of course it was windy, it was an industrial wasteland, no trees to get in the way of wind.) But we were desperate for escape from dark office drudgery. We started making bigger laps. We walked to the far ends of the parking lot. And then one day, we just decided to start walking down one of the highways, until we found something. I mean, we didn't say, "Let's walk until we find something", but that's what was in our minds. And so we took a long walk and eventually we came to a break in the buildings and roads. It was a little patch of land that had been cleared. They were going to build something there. The ground was all muddy and there was a hole filled with muddy water. But there was some vegetation growing around the muddy pit! It was great. We stopped there and talked about why they would dig such a hole.

Then we went back to work and had to stay late because we had taken such a long walk at lunch.
Eventually that company moved its office to downtown Montreal and I liked the job much better. They laid me off in the fall.

The drive

Reposted from 2.mar.05 from irrealis.

I've lived in Montreal for 7.5 years but am originally from Scituate, Massachusetts, a town about 45 minutes south of Boston. During these years, I have made the drive between my two homes so many times, in owned, borrowed, rented cars, and I never tire of it. I especially love the long stretch of empty highway in Vermont (I was going to write "rural Vermont", but that's like writing "died fatally"). This stretch of road is totally desolate at night - few other cars, total darkness, only the occasional dim light of a distant house or farm. This same bit of country -it runs through a sort of valley in the Green Mountains - is prone to extreme weather. I have driven through some of the most intense rain and snow I have ever experienced on that road. Totally dangerous - if you went off the road into the ditch, it could be the next day before someone notices you - but also thrilling; driving through storms, I usually turn off the radio and talk to myself out loud, encouraging, advising, commenting, heckling.

Doing the Montreal-Boston drive in winter and summer evoke different memories and associations. Like, for winter:

Driving down to visit my family for Christmas one year in my 1990 Grand Am that had no heat. The temperature outside was absolutely glacial. The windshielf kept icing up from my frozen breath but I had no way to defrost it. Sometimes I would crank the fan, even though there was no heat, hoping that a bit of the warmth generated by the engine would blow into the car. I don't think this worked. When I got out of the car at the end of the drive, I was virtually paralyzed from the waist down; the cold had driven the blood into the (relatively) warmer climes of deep tissue and my leg muscles were sort of useless.

In summer:

The best summer drive is going from Boston back to Montreal, leaving in the evening, with the Red Sox on the radio. I listen to the game on AM radio through Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the signal fading slowly along with the daylight. Somewhere in Vermont, both are gone. Baseball on the radio. That's old school. I never knew either of my grandfathers, but that's what I picture grandfathers doing. Sitting around, drinking beer, wearing just white t-shirts, listening to baseball on the radio.

Hey Grandpa, what are you doing this weekend? Want to rent a car and drive down to Boston, then turn right back around?

Le temps des brioches

Reposted from 7.feb.05 from irrealis.

Our brief reprieve from the winter temperatures continues, and it quickens my step. Yesterday, I rode the bus downtown, and when I pulled the string to indicate that I wanted to get off at the next stop, the pitch of the "arrêt demandé" ding was perfectly in tune with the song I was listening to on my headphones.

I stepped out into the sun.

Like a fever breaking

Reposted from 2.feb.05 from irrealis.

Walking home late on this weird, warm night. The air is wet, mist under the streetlights. There has been a smog warning for days.

This mist won't help.

But I pretend we're shaking the winter off. Like a fever breaking. Only with the opposite temperatures.