things move around

Just looking through a bunch of old letters I received from my school friends during my first year at uni, ‘95. There are none from the following year: suddenly, all our correspondence was electronic, and that’s all fucking long lost, now.

Additional: For some reason I’m amazed that we used to write proper letters to eachother, letters of one to eight pages in length, handwritten, with the sending address and date in the top right corner, purely for fun or friendship. Incredibly, I can’t imagine spending that much time or effort on friendship now. Perhaps friendship isn’t as important to me these days, or I am lazier than before, but I know neither is the case. It’s just that my affections have become diffused, unreal, dissipated: so I suppose real friendship isn’t as important to me as it used to be. But then I’m not one of those people who mail cakes to people they meet online.

Endless rain in Vancouver. I read a sci-fi story once about the terraforming of Venus, phase I of which is performed by bacteria whose purpose is to transmute the acidulous Venusian atmosphere into air as we know it. The by-product is planet-wide torrential rain for centuries and millenia; a sea-creating, invariant rain that renders the senses defunct. All the characters go mad from the rain and kill each other with sticks. Well, the rain we have now is nowhere near as bad as that, but it is a pain in the arse all the same. Here’s a picture of E heading for Japan on one of the few non-rainy days we’ve had this year:

Yesterday when I got in from work I asked the girl at the desk where the nearest liquor store was. She explained that there was one really close by: all I had to do was take a right on the highway and drive a little way…

She looked aghast when I asked how long it would take to walk. She swallowed and said she “wouldn’t recommend” walking. But I was adamant. She said it might be as much as 15 minutes there and another 15 back. At this news I reeled. 15 minutes! There was no guarantee I would make it to the liquor store and back. But the main thing, I reflected, was to make it there.

Accordingly, I postponed my expedition for 24 hours, during which time my apprehension at the prospect of my forthcoming ordeal was such that I was scarcely able to accomplish a stroke of work.

Today when I got in from no work I had a clever idea. I would combine my reckless march to the distant liquor store with a visit to a pharmacy, where I could get bandages for blisters, mosquito nets, ammunition, unguent, smelling salts (can you still buy smelling salts?), a sedan chair complete with native bearers, and, if necessary, balm for my broken lips. Since setting up home on the Pacific coast I can’t go inland without my face splitting apart like a mudflat.

It was a different girl at reception. Perhaps the first one was still in shock at the crazy foreigner who wanted to walk to the liquor store, or perhaps she was shopping the freakish tale to Fox and the Weekly World News. Is there a pharmacy nearby, I asked. Why yes - just hang a right on the highway, over the bridge, past the liquor store…

I walked down the six-lane highway, out of Spokane’s limp heart and along one of its arteries, into one of its limbs, like those of a starfish, groping blindly in the night for a purchase on a rolling, dispassionate slab of terra firma. The sides of the highway were lichened with independent commerce and a few chains, with autobody shops and appliance stores, with tanning salons, tattooists, hair salons, a gunsmith, big box hardware and army surplus outlets, a coin dealer, barbers, comics, porn and manga, endless cheap eateries with buffets and bogofs, and every store had a large sign jutting out over the road, white lines with removable black lettering, saying SOFA LOVE $60 / MONTH, CLAY PIGEONS $5.99, and BIG FISH MEAL $4.99. I walked for 40 minutes, quite quickly, through the efflorescence of enterprise, the exhaust fumes and the gloaming, up on to a hill, where I found the pharmacy, and from where the whole town was visible as it lit its lights. And in the 80 minutes I was walking on the wide sidewalk, I didn’t see another living thing, except a bum I overtook on the way back, and a lost looking woman lolling obesely at a bus stop, and three crazed teens whose heads emerged from the windows of an SUV and gurned at me, and jeered. And the liquor store was closed, but I got a bottle of local wine from the hotel, which turned out OK. I’m just pouring the last of it out now, as I sit here writing this and listening to Carlton and the Shoes, looking out at the river, heavy with snowmelt, full of motive in the stealthy, starless night.

The unusual lack of rain in my life has coincided with the start of the cricket world cup. I’m looking out over the hillocky brown terrain of Spokane, where the sky, except for some broken, chrome-coloured clouds in the distance, is crisp and fresh as a laundered sheet, and following Canada’s batsmen as they struggle to make headway against Kenya. It’s not looking good for the Canadian cricketers, who are on 150 for 6 from 43 overs.

[Note that I’m following the cricket on the internet. The game is being played in St Lucia, not right under my nose in Spokane, WA].

I was wrong about Spokane, and my sneering dog-for-sale jibe of yesterday was unfair. The wind slowed to a benign breeze yesterday afternoon, and when I got back to my hotel I stood on my shallow balcony on the second floor and looked out over the eponymous river, sliding by brimful with snowmelt and the recent rain. With its treelined banks and surface eddies glimmering in the evening light, it reminded me of the Severn in the town where I grew up. The tokenistic tower blocks of downtown were out of sight behind me; the only sound was the intermittent whooshing of a freeway where it bridged the river a block away. It was 11 or 12 degrees C, and the air felt pleasant on my skin. The nimbostratus of the morning had given way to scattered white cumulus, which glowed pink with the late lingering tendrils of the sun in what to an optimist would be a sure sign of spring.

I was greeted by a clever location-specific ad when I logged into my other blog today:

I’d say the four featured items are pretty representative of Spokane, WA, based on my first impressions of the place. A moribund hound, and three big-ass American automobiles. Yes, that about covers it.

At the airport at 5:00 this morning, I and the huddled masses, to seek our golden destiny in the far fair land of Amurikey. The snoutfaced border guard squinted derisively at my visa application, complete with laughably hyperbolic testimonial from my employer, but stamped it regardless.

The Gulf Islands, dull blobs in the dawn, skidded from under us like scree, and Portland, where I changed planes, was helplessly cloudbound: held in the grip of another colourless March day.

On to Spokane, "heart of the inland Northwest" (everywhere is at the heart of something), and sometime home of legendary Tool bassist Paul d'Amour, goldrush starlet Klondike Kate Rockwell, and little-known crooner Bing Crosby. Strangely, all moved on at an early age. But I fancied I made out the ghost of Klondike Kate, keening a lovelorn lament, on the wind which buffeted me across the tarmac into the echoey arrivals hall.

The company I work for is obsessed with safety, because its operations are inherently dangerous and no-one likes it when people get injured or killed. Safety is required to be top of the agenda for every meeting, regardless of subject; safety is measured and analysed in minute detail by personnel dedicated to safety; safety is writ large in cheesy slogans above doors and on the flyblown walls of lunchrooms. There is a “weekly safety message” promulgated to each site by the relevant safety authority.

Us white-collar head office parasites, however, don’t have much to worry about other than donut-induced dyspepsia or exposure to the noxious fumes generated by the tax guys in their windowless den. So our Director of Safety has become increasingly desperate in his weekly safety messages. About a month ago there was a little sermon on the evils of jaywalking. And back at the end of November there was this bombshell:

With the rain that has been inundating Vancouver and parts of Washington, many of you have encountered people with umbrellas or are carrying one in an effort to stay dry.

Have you ever considered the inherent hazards associated with an umbrella? Let’s see…An umbrella has a pointed end on the center support and stays that protrude at just about someone’s eye level. Additionally they can partially obstruct our vision.

During this season it would be wise for each of us to take additional care with our protection and certainly be aware of others who may have obscured vision and could injure you.

Today’s message suggests the poor chap has progressed from having a laugh to cracking up:

Safety is simply a conversation.  If you take a moment and apply that conversation to the situations that present themselves, you will have a Safety Mindset.  As you go through this week, and future weeks, keep the conversation alive.  This conversation is between you and yourself; you and your co-workers; you and a stranger on the street.   Safety is contagious and hopefully you are catching the fever.

At about eleven o'clock today I am going to eat a big fuck-off juicy pork pie, and no-one is going to stop me.

Edit: not even Geoff Capes.

Sometimes, when I was at school, my friends and I would enact a curious formalised rite conceived by Dave (real name), who was one of our group. Dave was the master of ceremonies and would intone metronomically “barrow, barrow, barrow, barrow…” and so on, while the rest of us simulated pushing wheelbarrows langourously and aimlessly around the schoolyard. After a time the “barrow…” mantra would be broken by Dave’s shriek of “tree!”, which was the signal for us all to immediately adopt tree-form, standing motionless, our limbs jutting haphazardly, our fingers rigid. Presently Dave would recommence his “barrow, barrow, barrow, barrow…”, and the cycle would be repeated maybe three or four times, until boredom set in.

As I understood it (or I may have elaborated this theory to myself in the years since) this ritual was a dramatic interpretation of the lifestyle of the gypsy-travellers who were frequent inhabitants of our locale. The directionless wheelbarrowing symbolised their carefree itinerancy, and the cry of “tree!” was a cue to make themselves inconspicuous, by blending into nature, at the approach of the authorities who would disrupt that lifestyle.