things move around

My companion’s name is Richard; he is 39 and lives with his parents, whose house he spends his weekends painting. When we got into the car on the first day, at the bungalo-style provincial airport, Richard almost forgot something important. He ran to the trunk, grabbed a travel-pack of CD’s, and tossed it on the grey protrusion between the seats. As he drove I flicked through. I quite like listening to the radio when in the interior, because it’s all schmaltz-rock and hilarious Canadian Content, but that seemed rude after Richard’s ostentatious remembering of the CD’s. Most of them were home-made, presumably from downloads; some were original. He had the best of Phil Collins (or it may have been the very best). He had some Kenny G, I can’t remember if that was the best of Kenny G or just average Kenny G. There was a collection of Latin ballads, some Il Divo, and Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation”. I’m lying about one of those, see if you can guess which. He also had a best of Santana, and what a lot of crap that is, Santana, what a nadir. Lock him in a room with Kenny G and throw away the room.

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As I packed for this trip, I threw socks into my bag at random. I reasoned there was a 50% chance that I would hit on an even number of socks - but guess what? I hit on an odd one. An odd number of socks: a number of socks, all odd.

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As I pack up my stuff again, I listen to Schumann warbling from my porta-speakers, scoriated by the whine of the local kids on their quads, whooping and buzzing in the muggy twilight over the broken ground behind the motel. I dodged a quad bike earlier tonight, as I padded along the edge of one of the town’s two baseball diamonds, en route to the cold beer & wine store. But the nights proper, after about eleven, are unblemished, the night skies starry seas, sleep an aimless quiet coracle.

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This evening, at the end of the wending, barely exorable access road, as we drove up to the site exit, I saw a car idling, doors akimbo, before the lowered barrier. I got out and went to the gatehouse, where the driver of the abandoned car stood reading a notice about recent grizzly bear sightings. He was a spry quinquagenarian with a healthy hairless scalp and a slew of stray grey whiskers. I nodded at him and picked up the radio mouthpiece and with my thumb on the smooth plastic button said “Loss Prevention”, with half a question mark. After a while the speaker crackled and emitted unintelligible speech, so I said, “this is Yarb signing out, and,” seeing that the gentleman’s car was in front of mine i.e. in my way, I looked into his eyes, and he said “Lorenzo”, “and also Lorenzo” I said. After a mute minute, some beeps came from the speaker, and Lorenzo walked out of the shack and drove off in his car through the rising gate, which had not yet reached its apogee as he disappeared down the road, over a rise, raising a pall of dirt and dust behind him. And here he is now, being read over by you and written over by me, and all we know for sure about the man is his name, Lorenzo, and that he knows about the grizzly bears.

At lunchtime I went looking for a breadbin. First I went to the Bay, but their breadbins were shoddy and expensive at $79; I had been hoping to pay no more than half that. Breadbins and linen are two things which are much costlier in reality than in my imagination. Household goods in general.

To find the breadbins in the Bay I had to descend two escalators to the skytrain level. I was in the bowels of the south end of the Pacific Centre Mall, a place of mystery and confusion to me. Normally my sense of location is strong, but in Pacific Centre Mall (and malls in general, but especially this one) I’m like a migratory bird in the presence of high-voltage wires. The up escalator eluded me; I wanted to run up the down escalator but it was single-file and occupied by a string of mall-zombies. A strong argument against the veracity of the major religious texts, and for the moral authority of religions in general, is that none of them, as far as I’m aware, mentions special punishment for the souls of people who stand still on down-escalators. All around me, the displays of household goods blurred into a kaleidoscopic welter of chrome and maroon. My state of mind wasn’t helped by the psychaedelic music coming out of my headphones. I moved at random through the Bay, putting myself at the mercy of the mall, and after a while I stumbled into the food court, where the air was thick with putrid fast food fumes.

I remember emerging into the raised walkway spanning Dunsmuir street, between the north side of the mall and the south, but not how I got from the skytrain level to the second floor. I must have walked through some kind of portal, some kind of wormhole linking the different levels of the mall. Is it really that fanciful to imagine spacetime, in the Pacific Centre Mall, being warped by the intense psychic energy of the thronging consumers? And sometimes a hapless shopper walks, unaware, through such a kink, and the homogeneity of the mall interior ensures that he or she is none the wiser, except perhaps for a nagging intuition which is quickly suppressed by the rational mind.

At one point I found myself in the fitting room of a store so big I had no idea which one it was; I hastened on. I saw signs for an exit, so I followed them for a while, but they petered out like tracks in a trackless wilderness. I noticed lots of fire exits, but I didn’t want to use them in case I set off alarms and caused the evacuation of the mall. Eventually I got out, and asked a passer-by for the time, not wanting to trust my own watch which may have been subject to temporal disturbances. I had been in the mall for about half an hour. To be sure, I picked up a newspaper and checked the date.

Later I found a highly desirable breadbin in Cookworks on Hastings, but it was $89. I’m not the sort of person who can justify paying $89 for a breadbin, no matter how decadent and luxurious. $89 breadbins are the sort of thing I imagine Conrad Black spunking his allegedly ill-gotten gains on, perhaps as a romantic surpise gift for his wife. If only the jury could see Black’s breadbins (for he must have more than one), the prosecution’s job would be done. The Roman empire, in its last days of dissipation and degeneracy, would have been awash with $89 breadbins. Even the slaves would have had them.

I’d try eBay, but I’m loth to buy a breadbin from some anonymous huckster on the other side of the world. I shudder to think what could ensue.

According to reports released on 13 June 2007, 70 percent of the crimes that are reported in Caracas are committed using motorcycles.

- from today’s corporate travel bulletin.

This seems extraordinarily high to me. I wonder how it compares with other cities. I’d say no more than 30% of all criminal activity here in Vancouver makes use of motorcycles. What is it like in your part of the world; have you noticed that where there is skullduggery a motorcycle is usually to be found nearby?

The province next door to me, Alberta, publishes its complete list of baby names annually (BC only lists names used five times or more). Looking at the Alberta list for 2006, the following trends are discernible at the lunatic fringe:

Spelling-shock: Maksymilian, Scye, Skyy, Ui’lliam, Kohnstence, Krymson, Lexzis, MaKynze, Merczaydes, Mystyque, Quynh-Anh (Queen Anne?), Rraevan, Sumr, Xzander, Zohwea (Zoe?)

Sci-fi: Galaxia, Daxx, Darius-Draco, Ja’Naar, Jayzl, Kreg, K’i, Ugnius, X’ziah, Zeryck, Kal-el.

People and places: Beckham, Zidane, Pele, Cleveland, Kiev, Cardiff, Vegas, Eowyn, Paxton, Rogue, Jericho-Rocky.

Hippie names: DylanThomas, Llyric, Soul, Soulsay, Spirit, Autumn-Jewels, Believe, Dusty-Storm, Gladness, Morningstar, Poet, Prophecy, Sundance, Trail-Dancer.

Triple-hyphened-names: Emperor-Phu-Lac, Daniel-Bernard-Danger.

Something-J: A.J., CJ, K.J., LJ, Mj, Rj.

Other nonsense: Furious, Bienvenido, BjornJack, Chypper, Dequawn, Drickus, Jiggs, Kheops, Notorious, Sevn, Stetsun, Thong, Charlatan, Corinthian, Shay-D, Sloane, Tuesday, Tuba, Tymber.

But the weirdest ones for me aren’t these one-off brainwrongs (©Chris Morris), but the popular ones. The Braydens, Jaydens and Kaydens and the thousand variations thereon, and the surnames. There are so many little Carters, Coopers, Pipers, Riders, and Hunters biting our ankles these days that before long we’ll be like the East Asians, with our surnames coming before our forenames. Last year in Alberta there were 191 boys named Carter and 97 called Hunter. What is the allure of Carter, exactly? A carter was a bloke who hauled a cart for a living in days of yore. 200 years from now when everything is teleported, will parents be calling their offspring Long-Distance Trucker? Will that be cool? Probably.

It’s 11:53 p.m. - past my bedtime. I can’t sleep because Kate is snoring loudly. I said to myself at half-ten that if she was still hard at it by eleven, I’d get up and blog. But I was weak and got up four minutes early, at 10:56. Still, she’s snoring because she’s pregnant, so I have only myself to blame.

I’m not tired. Outside, a squally rain is slicking the paving and intermittently smearing the window-walls of our apartment. The city at night is full of rain and puddly, yellow light.

There is no piece of music which cannot be improved by the removal of the hapsichord part. Bloody harpsichords, twittering on. Even the music that comes without harpsichords should be double-checked for their residue. Composers should be certified harpsichord-free, for the benefit of the public, i.e. me.