things move around

It’s the brittle hiss of traffic and the sky like dark slate. It’s the kind of evening that makes the cats howl, the cops edgy, and the kids alright.

Still in Calgary, land of a thousand shades of brown. I had my hair cut today by an entertaining Filipino woman. She was from a southerly area of the Phillippines called Leyte, but at first I thought she was telling me her name was Leta, short for Letitia. In fact I think that was her name - it’s possible that she was named after the region where she was born, like the punk guitarist America Vespucci or the economist Simon Bolivia, or even semi-legendary Scottish fitballer and bon vivant Alan Brazil. Note that Alan Brazil has a blog, although be warned, it wasn’t worth the google.

Soon the conversation took a turn for the paranormal. Leta told me that last summer she had visited the beautiful Lake Okanagan in the interior of British Columbia. This is a region replete with valleys and bluffs, semi-arid in parts but fertile and with microclimates, suited to the cultivation of peaches and grapes. As she weighed up my ridiculously uneven sideburns, she confided in me that she was out on a boat on the lake one early evening, the sun bursting apart like a ripe pumpkin on the Western shore, when she became aware of something in the water, just out of oar’s reach. I asked her how big it was and she said it was bigger than a person, probably bigger than two. It moved quickly and sinuously (not the word Leta used) through the water, away from her boat and off out of sight into a dark part of the lake, leaving a wake behind it.

It was only later that evening, when she told her host about what had happened, that she learned of the creature Ogopogo, the lake-monster of Okanagan known first as N’ha-a-itk to countless generations of the local Indians, and then to the white settlers who tried to photograph it with the kind of primitive apparatus which is probably all the rage among modern photographers for its halo effect. She asked me if I believed her. I told her I did, and that in my opinion Ogopogo and other lake monsters (she was amazed to hear of Nessie) were creatures from alternate realities temporarily transported into ours via dimensional portals, and that this explained the continued frustration of all attempts to capture such a beast.

Leta’s own theory was that the creature was “half a person, half a fish”. I got the impression that this was based on some folktale from her homeland. She said that she missed Leyte, with its sandy beaches and fresh seafood and humidity, and all her brothers and cousins there. They all thought she must be loaded, living in Calgary, and that she probably didn’t have to lift a finger to make her money, and that she definitely had servants. Apparently even her cousin in Manila, who owns a gas station, believes this.

So I’m in the bar and this bloke comes up to me and says “my flat’s worth at least half a million these days - shame I don’t own it. To be honest with you I blame New Labour - but then again, I voted for them. What can I say? Oh well - there’s always the football - or there would be, if I wasn’t a City fan.”

I admit I was jealous. He was living the life of wryly.

If you’re going to pray, don’t address your prayers to God,
pray to the impotent instead:
the flea-bitten dog in the dirt,
the meteorologist with a permanent cold in his head,
the alcoholic born and bred in Riyadh
or the nun with a habit.

Don’t pray to God,
pray to the ignorant instead:
venerate the dunce’s hat,
the bus-passenger ranting and waving his mastercard,
the Englishman abroad,
and every other numbskull and retard you meet.

No, don’t pray to God;
worship the crazed and afflicted:
the bare-chested man bellowing from the canal boat,
the woman who loves tweed,
and the bloke in the designer suit who stands in the road
scattering seeds on the tarmac in the dead of night.

The woman in the shop tells me that my new laptop bag is made by the people who make Swiss Army knives. She unzips all the compartments and disembowels the bag of its tissue-paper stuffing. “Look, this is for your cellphone” she says, with an encouraging look on her face. I marvel appropriately. At the till, she remembers something else, delves, rummages, and shows me a keyring attached to an interior wall of the bag, sort of like a tonsil. There’s a rotating thing on a stick too, don’t know what that is, and a little shoehorn which plays the theme tune to ‘Ski Sunday’.

The bag is backpack-style. I have an abiding spite for luggage carried other than on the back. I just can’t see a single advantage of handheld luggage. Go on, name one advantage. Yet the hegemony of the suitcase is worse than ever these days. You stand at the baggage reclaim and it’s just hard-shelled suitcase after hard-shelled sodding suitcase. At least, say, 10 years ago the suitcases showed some variation: there were different sizes and styles, hideous tartans and flannels still in circulation. Now all that’s gone. And then amidst all this homogeneity a rucksack tumbles out of the chute and you can see people flinch and recoil at the perversity of it. People get really freaked out by it. But with your luggage on your back you can flick the v’s at the suitcase-dragging clowns as you beat them to taxi rank.

One other thing: girls with rucksacks = hot.

I hate it when I buy a bottle of whisky and it comes in a decorative cardboard tube, from which I derive no utility and which only takes up space which could be occupied by perfectly good air. What do the manufacturers think I’m thinking? That a cardboard tube with a whisky brand all over it will come in handy as what, a vase to show off my hydrangeas? Some kind of Blue-Peter megaphone? Presumably there are a lot of imbeciles out there buying whisky because they get a free cardboard tube which they can bellow down to amplify their cretinous opinions. If any of you are reading this, here’s a proposition: I’ll save you the trouble of drinking your whisky with cranberry juice or red bull or whatever wank-headed mixer is currently in vogue in exchange for a regular supply of the rolled-up cardboard you crave. Please note that the delivery of said cardboard, in accordance with ancient Scottish Mel Gibson Och Aye High Road Bonnie Lassie Over The Ocean tradition, may involve beating around the head. But why whisky? You don’t see it with vodka. Vodka drinkers are all too busy drooling over the display.

Calgary’s cooled from 20° to an evening 15° and I’m sat here in the almost altogether, listening to The Jam and drinking sunsational Pinot Noir from New Zealand. Every half hour or so there’s a shrieky bellow of brakes and buffers from the railway sidings ten stories down outside my window.

I went to the desk and asked if they had toothpaste. “Sure” said the guy, “you can get it from us or you can order it up from housekeeping”. He explained that if I ordered it up from housekeeping I’d get “like a tiny thimble or something, like this much”, but it would be free, whereas if I got it from him I’d get “a real big tube, you know, like this” and it would cost me “two bucks or something”. I was sold and paid $2.27 for the big fuck off tube.

Everyone’s enjoying the barbecue weather: all the women are in skirts and some of the men are in shorts.

I had dinner in a deserted Italian restaurant with a bloke called Grant. Grant told me that he and his father hadn’t seen eye to eye for a long time, but things were better between them now. I asked him what he thought of the painting on the wall and he looked at me uncomprehendingly. I learnt that Grant’s father is a dentist and an enviable sketch-artist.

Now I’m listening to Gavin Friday. “Take me back to ‘72, my coo-coo-choo” he leers.

The cry of a drunken prairie-boy finds a thermal and ascends to my ear in a lopsided spiral.

It’s a lovely Pinot Noir, I’m getting beetroot and barnacles and hyperbolic hexagons, but I’m a little stuffed up for some reason. Perhaps it’s the sunlight. I once met a savant who ascribed physical properties to sunlight. He saw it as a stream of minuscule spear-shaped butter-soft particles which infiltrated the brain and produced no end of deleterious effects. He recommended the wearing of sunhats by all who valued their reason or their intellect.

And now the sun is pulling the downy-white Rockies over its head and switching itself off for the night.

In a railway sidings a string of oilcars quivers
as the sun falls behind the mountains in the direction of my love.

This morning I’m shambling the mile or so from my home to my office with my right foot taking on water. I’ve known my shoes are fucked for some time but done nothing about it, out of spite I suppose. The soles are just falling off the shoe. God knows why, I’ve only been wearing them a year and they weren’t exactly cheap. So I think why should I go and buy a new pair of shoes or even worse hand over my money to an upstart cobbler, just because my shoes are fucked after a year? I’m having none of that, I’m wearing them into the ground like in that Richard Bachman novella.

The right shoe is in a slightly worse state of disrepair, perhaps because that’s the one I lead with when stepping off kerbs and kicking dangerous dogs in the guts, so the right one is the first to let the rain in. So I’m walking along in the pissing rain this morning, my right foot feeling like a soggy sockful of cabbage, me feeling like a Dickensian orphan who’s just been kicked out of the poorhouse for being too poor, and then it hits me if I’m not careful I’ll be getting trenchfoot (rotting disease from World War One). So as soon as I get to work I take a stanley knife to the shoe and slice it off my foot along with my sock, and after applying a wadding of iodine and gauze I bandage my foot and ankle up and suspend my right leg in the air using a sling I’ve rigged up to the ceiling. But my boss is having none of it.

“D’you have allergies?” asks the tax guy to whom I have referred in the past as Mike. Ostensibly Mike is making small talk with Percy - or is it Ken? - all part of the ‘getting-to-know-you’ process. Presumably Ken, out of my line of sight behind a flimsy interior wall, has taken some medication or sneezed or dabbed his eye with a handkerchief or given some indication that he has allergies. But there is a terrible subtext: Mike is probing the newcomer for psychological weaknesses, insecurities, faulty wiring in the bulb, call it what you will. Mike is newly-shorn and his once-bleary blue eyes are shining bright in response to the challenge presented by the interloper. Ken is a man who spends 80% of his time demurring and therefore his response is predictable: he demurs, and the first iron slab of a hierarchy is established. This is the kind of everyday confrontation, constructed from pure will or if you will pure spunk, by which men establish their empires on this earth and ultimately ascend to the wide welkin, from whence their enduring light directs the dream-travels of their descendants after they are gone. Then all three of the tax guys go for their morning coffee. As to how Ken spends the remaining 20% of his time, I wouldn’t want to hypothesise.