n: vb: the spice of imagination
Illustration by Manhattan-based writer-artist Zina Saunders, best known for Overlooked New York, a collection of interviews, profiles and portraits of diverse New York subcultures and hobbyists.
May the New Year bring peace, and with it hope.
May you be written in the Book for health, happiness and prosperity.
May the New Year bring blessings to all of us and miracles to those of us in need of them.
Ah well. Once crisis at a time. As is, possibly only I will be going to the wedding, while David stays behind in Montreal, as Katie’s offer of a place to stay fell through at the very last minute. That way we only have to pay for one ticket, he can stay in the land of light and architecture with my friends who are now his friends as well, and I can brave the unexpected knocking on doors for a couch alone, which should drastically improve my chances. I’ve a proven track record of finding overnight lodging with friendly strangers in Toronto. David, not so much. Then, hypothetically, after the wedding, I come straight back, and we stay in Montreal until it’s time to go down to Toronto for Nuit Blanche, and our inevitable bus-ride home.
It all depends if I can find a place to stay at all. The ticket(s) have to be bought today, and yet, as of this afternoon, we still have nowhere. If, in a few hours, we still haven’t made contact with an available couch, I’m not sure what else we could do, except to split up and reconnect in a few days. Two people stranded in Toronto with luggage is a far more depressing picture than just me alone with an over-night bag.
BTW: I can’t stop doing the Happy Camera Dance. It is just so great!!!
Things I Have Learned On My Summer Autumn Vacation 72 Hour Bus-Trip
into the night and off we go….
Until I double-checked our tickets tonight to see exactly when our stop-overs are, David and I had mistaken our departure for Friday morning, not tomorrow morning.
Lucky thing I checked. Sort of.
Now, very suddenly, we only have seven hours to pack and get to the bus station…
Also, for the record, our stop-overs are:
Calgary, Sept 18, 10:45 pm
Regina, Sept 19, 10:30 am
Winnipeg, Sept 19, 9:40 pm
Thunder Bay, Sept 20, 7:55 am
Sudbury, Sept 20, 11:50 pm
Ottawa, Sept 21, 7:05 am
We arrive in Montreal Sept 21, at 10:20 am.
Got friends any of those places, send them down to the bus-station.
Sam sells Samsung as Ted Brown. My favourite part is that he doesn’t know the slightest thing about football, and his instructions were to ad-lib, so when he told the director, the director wrote a batch of post-it notes of football sounding factoids and stuck them to the green screens for him.
I love my friends.
How to Sell Your Uterus, Eggs, Kidney, Liver, Spleen, Plasma, Sperm, Hair & Body for Cash.
Listening to unreleased Coldplay at work, some follow up thing to the new album, wondering what it’s going to be like traveling across the prairies. I took this trip before, once, a very long time ago, to visit my grandmother in Winnipeg with my father. He bought me a milk carton full of gumballs somewhere half-way through Saskatchewan and made me promise I wouldn’t tell my mother. I bit into them like tiny, hollow, miniature apples in rainbow colours, orange, green, yellow, blue and red. They were white inside and stale, chewy. If I sucked on them, they painted my lips like convenience store make-up. They tasted like childhood, even then, as if I already understood that cheap sugar and heavy dyes are basic ingredients in the manufacture of poor children. Some moments, twenty years later, I can still taste them, the candy flavour echo like sad edges of broken smiles.
I expect this trip to be more memorable, though perhaps in twenty years it too will only survive as one thematic memory, a single ikon that encapsulates the entire six days in transit.
