things move around

Two observations this evening: 

1. in this hotel room, whenever the mini-fridge activates, the table lamp dims. And vice versa, when the fridgette shudders to a halt, the lamp returns to its full effulgence.
2. before dinner, in the laughable local “fine dining” joint:

me: I’ll have a half litre of the house red please.
waitress: what’s that?
me: the house red, it’s wine.
waitress: red wine?
me: yes.

and after the first course:

waitress: are you done?
me: yeah, thanks [my plate is empty]
waitress: would you like to keep your knife and fork?
me: —
waitress: [puts knife and fork back down on table, walks off]
me: why don’t I keep the plate too?

Minutes later she’s back for my companion’s plate - but not his knife and fork. This time she’s half way back to the kitchen, bearing the full set of mess kit, when she stops, turns round, returns to our table, and deposits the greasy cutlery. What I don’t understand is that there’s nothing in this for her: the restaurant saves no money by not putting a knife and fork into the dishwasher with everything else. So she must be doing it because she thinks, as “fine diners”, we either expect it, or will be charmed by this innovation in the table service, and leave magnanimous tips as a result. Where did she get this idea? Did she grow up in a fucking army camp, or what?

Now I don’t want to live anywhere but Vancouver, don’t get me wrong, I’m not some kind of perverted anthropologist with a plaid fetish, but small town Canada: I bloody love it.

1. Flute - a lute tuned to F
2. Contrabandsoon - a bassoon wadded with skag-sacks
3. Bass piccolo
4. Harpsigong
5. Strumpet

I’ve perfected the art, if that’s what it is, of descending through thick black thunder / snowclouds in flimsy aircraft. Two quick G&T’s, a novel with prose just dense enough to be unreadable in turbulence, and music which is both ethereal and grounded, ideally with strings - I have found the Beatles’s “Good Night” and the last movement of Mahler’s fourth symphony effective. As we dive, I enter a euphoric trance: the buck and tumble of the plane feels like a hundred hands beneath me, bearing me off to some wild ecstatic festival or pagan rite. I can’t say if this approach would help with aviophobia, but it makes an otherwise tiresome descent the highlight of my trip.

I asked one of the girls at the mine today if she was planning on dressing up for hallowe’en. “You bet” she said. As what, I asked. A goblin, a superhero, a hag? “No,” she said, “as a sumo”.

I wasn’t sure if I had heard her right so I said, “a sumo?”

“Yeah. I’ve got this sumo suit that makes you look like a sumo. You know, biiig.” While she said “biiig”, she extended her arms forward and curved them inward, to simulate the encircling of an enormous belly.

-20˚c this morning. Looking into the sun, I could see tiny droplets of ice scintillating in the air. And haughty lugubrious elk, stood in and alongside the road, licking at the salt, eyeing approaching vehicles disdainfully.

Admiral Point twirls his moustache and allows a distant smile to prowl across his chops as he seats himself at the oval boardroom table. He doesn’t give a toss about the agenda, or the other non-execs stretching off to his port and starboard.

This is because Admiral Point has just ridden the elevator with a man who, simply from looking at his exquisite eggshell-blue eyes, he knows is the son he abandoned forty years ago in Guatemala, when he was a lusty young submariner and she bored with her station as diplomat’s wife. Somehow the encounter leaves the Admiral stirred, but not shaken. Rosemary, that was her name. Rosemary Manor. Admiral Point (ret.) slips into a tropical reverie of creamwhite thighs, starlit cuba libres, and stolen moments in the broad shade of a mango tree. ‘65, he thinks. ‘65, my finest year.

Of course there’s no question of saying anything. It’s a ridiculous situation. I don’t need a son now any more than I did then, and I doubt the acquisition of a(nother) father was uppermost in his mind this morning.

Meanwhile, the chairman drones. Or “El Presidente” as he’s called by the more obsequious junior execs.

I wandered the corridors of the sixth floor, a place of utter mystery to me, until I heard voices. I entered the corporate library through a back door, and fought my way through dense stacks to an area in which six or eight people were standing, chatting and snacking on home-baked brownies and lavender shortbread. I recognised someone I knew, a woman from H.R. who I once sat next to on a plane. Her name was (say) Cathy.

Cathy gestured to an array of stationery, laid out in a manner pleasing to the eye. “It’s free”, she said. There were pens, pads of paper, post-it notes, rolls of sticky tape, &c. It was good quality, but as far as I could tell it was the same stuff kept in the stationery cupboard on the fourth floor, where I work. Not wanting to appear churlish, I availed myself of a weighty rollerball.

Then a librarian approached. But not just any librarian: this was the coordinator himself, a bright-eyed Chinese-Canadian who shook my hand inoffensively. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and after a mute pause I made some asinine comment about the large quantity of books present. I realised that of the eight people in the room, four (or 50%) were library staff; the hosts of the corporate library open house were in danger of outnumbering the guests. This would be an embarrassment for the likeable coordinator. Secretly I prayed that a new guest would arrive before any of the present ones left.

Cathy was asking one of the librarians, or possibly the technician, if he could locate an article in a recent edition of the local paper. She explained that it was about computer addiction and she wanted to show it to her wayward, wargaming son. A passing hotshot from I.S. bragged that the son of the director of I.S. was ranked seventh in the world at World of Warcraft, causing all present to look down at their shoes.

I ate some lavender shortbread. I didn’t realise you could eat lavender. To be honest I think the lavender was a bit of a gimmick.

There was an exciting display of new books on the rise of China as an economic power. But I ignored this and went straight for the stack of books for giveaway. I weighed an ancient tome on the geology of Canada in my hands. I have an incipient interest in geology and thought maybe an old book would be simpler to understand than a new one, there being less accumulated knowledge in olden times than at the present day. But this book was pre-tectonic, and anyway, I still couldn’t make sense of the technical jargon.

I found a World’s Classics paperback edition of Nostromo and grabbed it, thereby relieving the corporate library of its sole work of fiction. Stunned, I asked the coordinator how Nostromo had got into the corporate library, and he smiled bemusedly and shook his head. All four library staff were keen to inspect my find. I sensed they had had some kind of wager as to what sort of person would claim Nostromo. There was no hint of disgruntlement at my ignoring the extensive collection of non-fiction and periodicals. It was smiles all round.

I left. Now the hosts outnumbered the guests.

I’ve just experienced a shimmer of excitement, rippling up from my heels, vibing through my achilles tendons, cruciate ligaments, and hamstrings, suffusing my groin with warmth, pulsing along my vertebrae and coming to rest, like a lightly-inflated helium balloon on a ceiling, in my brainpan. The cause? An MS Outlook reminder that the long-awaited corporate library open-house is but three hours away.

I love the corporate library, and count myself blessed to work for the sort of company which maintains such a thing. It has real books and everything. Of course no one really uses it, except perhaps the oldest of the old-school metallurgists and geologists. But times are good, and the library has recently expanded to a staff of four - a coordinator, two librarians, and a technician. Hence the open house, to celebrate. Refreshments, door prizes and free books are on offer. I’m counting down the minutes and the hours.

Generally speaking, a coordinator is the bottom rung on the ladder, the lowest of the low, menial, trivial, a drone. But in this case the coordinator is le grand fromage, el presidente, le directeur de la bibliotheque. The big man. The boss of the books. I’m looking forward to shaking them all by the hand.

Yesterday, stooping to right my capsized proto-toddler in the playground, I noticed a little shard of glass on the ground and removed it. Otherwise you know what happens, it ends up in someone’s eye, sloshing around in their vitreous humour, and then at night it grinds its way up the optic nerve like a pebble on a streambed, and you wake up with a bad headache, and the doctors slice open your cranium and say, look, by crikey, glass in the brain, and if his lobes and cortices aren’t slashed to bits I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! You know how it is.

No sooner have I picked up the shard than I’m lurching off like a big spasticated kite in a roaring hoolie, at the whim of my marauding offspring whose grip on my index finger is savage. But a nearby mom has seen me. One thing I’ve noticed about the playground, apart from there always being kids there, the other thing you see is moms. They congregate there. You have to watch them or they’ll try and talk to you, and how do you explain that after a day spent trying to pick your way through the internet without being swamped by countless mommy blogs, the last thing you want is the 3D, living variety coming at you like zombies.

So I show her the thing in my hand, the potentially brain-eviscerating nugget of glass I found on the floor of the playground. It is tiny and of course I’m not serious about the chances of it going up an eye-hole and flensing the old grey matter into a fluffy broth. But the mom is having none of my reassurances, she flees in terror, she almost forgets to take her progeny with her. Or perhaps she wasn’t terrified but just wanted to get home in time to blog the incident before any of the other moms.

Tonight I’m going to pull the same stunt with something else, a rubber tarantula, or a gun or something.

Baby E has been taking her first steps over the last couple of weeks. But they’re only baby steps at this point, and she still needs quite a bit of hand-holding. Ideally a more experienced colleague would be permanently assigned to babysit her during this induction period, but due to resource constraints this has not been possible. As a result, frequent intervention by senior management has been required. Going forward, we expect her to demonstrate increasing proficiency in this core competency, to be measured by daily evaluations, after office hours, in the playground.

after Office Baby

Thought I’d treat myself to a donut this morning. Of course there are no nuts in donuts these days. They call it a donut but effectively it’s just do.

I was excited to read in my local paper this morning that Vancouver might be getting its own poet laureate. But what is this? “They wouldn’t be expected to write poems for certain occasions”, says a city-hall pen-pusher. Instead, “the poet laureate acts as a champion for literacy, for language, using poetry as their medium for doing so.” What rot! I expect my civic poet laureate to be a recaltricant scrivener, forced by penury into the production of lengthy commemmorative odes, epithalamia for councillors’ daughters, eulogies of drab bureaucracy. Why pay a poet five grand a year, which is a wild amount of lucre for that sort of person, if you can’t compel 50 lines on the opening of a new needle exchange or off-leash dog-walking area? You might as well just hand over the cash to the first wheedling, gormless bachelor of arts you find, sitting outside the nearest Starbucks, dribbling chai latte down his goatee while fondling his new Powerbook.