Bad

I haven’t been updating. That’s not good.

I will write something soon. Life has gotten suddenly blue for me. Nothing in particular, just … everything.

A cup of tea, then. That’ll cheer me up.

Offense

I had lunch today with someone from my old work.

It wasn’t planned, just a happy coincidence. I was reading Dexter Filkin’s excellent The Forever War, and she had brought her microeconomics textbook to study. She has two kids who are just about to leave home, so she’s decided to go back to school. I stopped reading, and she bookmarked her text and closed it.

Tendrils

Yesterday, I spent my lunch hour finishing A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, in the city’s central square, on an all-too-rare sunny day.

It was gorgeous. The heat was that heavy, dry kind the prairies take on in the late summer, a constant, steady radiation that warms the skin, and keeps it from getting too damp with sweat.

Two figures moved in front of me. Two men, with cups of coffee, settled into a vacant bench to have a conversation. All of this I saw from the corner of my eye, and registered it barely, and would’ve dismissed it immediately if not for the cigars in their hands. I looked up. By now, a tendril of sweet cigar smoke had curled into my nose. I took a deep, surreptitious, happy breath.

That was it. I fell into memory, desire, and joy. A delicious effervescence flowed into my spine and, then, up into my head, spreading, tingling my nose.

And I decided that, before this weather ended, before the dark, cold days of winter came, I would do just what these were doing. A cigar, some coffee, and a friend for conversation. What better way to spend a hot, dry afternoon?

*      *      *

DFW’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is brilliant, and has convinced me to read every word this man has ever written. I am still going through Infinite Jest, and have started Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, our bookclub’s new selection. Short story collections are notoriously uneven (say, 2 good stories for every 5 so-so (or worse) stories), and I am troubled. Birds of America‘s first story was decent, but nothing memorable. The second starts nicely.

Sudden realization

I like the bench seat in the back of the bus, and it was where I was sitting this morning. Not that it should have anything to do with it, but I was not reading my book because it was a bright, sun-shiney morning. It was too nice to be buried in DFW’s thoughts on Michael Joyce as a tennis player.

If I could

If I could, if I could forget this morning, this job, this desk, office, chair, and computer, if I could, just for a few hours, I would:

1. Ride my bike until my legs tensed and burned, and my lungs went harsh and cold.
2. Clamp headphones to my head, lie back, close my eyes, and listen to Glen Gould softly plink Goldberg. Or The Rolling Stones.
3. Find a reading chair, a table, prepare a mug of coffee, bury myself in a blanket, and read.
4. Watch movies in an empty theatre, three in a row, fresh popcorn for each screening.
5. Drive to no where, stop, take pictures, and drive back.

I have need, now, to be alone, profoundly alone.

DFW ^ 2

I am reading/struggling through David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (a collection of his essays) and Infinite Jest (his magnum opus). If you have never read either, I would recommend reading both at the same time, taking a break from one with the other.

Every

I have a new desk in a pod, and I have access to a window. I look out over 99 street, and can see the public library, the Citadel, the main post office and the pyrimad of City Hall. Beyond this cluster of buildings is the city’s characteristic sprawl, its unplanned, unregulated overgrowth into the plains.

Within this sprawl lies the City Centre airport. The airport is primarily for chartered flights, air ambulances, freight, and the military.

Every 3:00, my window vibrates. A giant, four-turboprop plane, a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, rumbles into sight, swooping and twisting along the locus of it flight path, lower than I think it should, missing the City Hall clock tower by mere feet. It’s a curious sight, this giant plane, bigger than most buildings, barrelling towards its runway.

This happens every day. If it registers in the conciousness of anyone, of people my building, in the building next to mine, of the office workers and street people shuffling along 99th street, no one shows it.

I wonder about our capacity to be bored, to neglect things, to let ourselves lapse into hebetude. A football field just flew by my window, and no one seems to notice.

The List

Cleaning up my work notebook, I came across a scrawled shopping list. It is a strange artifact to come across, something familiar and ancient, alien and homely, all at the same time.

What the hell were we going to make?

On making up words

While surfing through Amazon.ca, tempting myself to buy a book I don’t need, I came across the page for Slow Death by Rubber Duck:  How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health.

I have no interest in reading a book better left as a long feature article. I scrolled down the page anyways, to read the reviews.

I came across this:

Well done, John Hodgman

Very funny.