HOW TO, AND ALL THAT JAZZ

as we were headed south, somewhere north of lafayette on 65, the lights on the turbines of the wind field flashed red and in unison around and ahead of us every couple of seconds. some of the turbines closer to the interstate were unlit, and most of the ones further away were invisible except for their lights. the expansive, quasi-futuristic effect of the field past dark was even more expansive and inspired even more saccharine future nostalgia than it had when i'd seen it in the daylight from a car headed north three days before. i sent her a text to mark my impression. she said that she'd seen the lights through the snow storm that had blown through northwest indiana on friday night as she was driving back. i dropped that, but then i turned to the driver and told him that i had a saint christopher medal in my pocket so not to worry. there wasn't any cause for worry, though, except -- apparently -- over whether i was superstitious. i told him no, but that the point of the medal was the cloying romance of embracing it. forgetting it in my pocket until the anecdote. like my soppy appreciation of the turbines in the frozen fields.

the snow storm that blew through northwest indiana on friday was likely part of the system that hit ohio the next day. the five inches that fell on evanston on thursday night might have been the beginning of the same, but more likely they were just the effect of the lake. there had been snow on the ground and on the tops of the buildings when we'd arrived in chicago that same day but nothing falling. the lake seemed to have had more of its effect farther north. and it was snowing again on saturday at noon when we left lucky platter and pushed our way through the bluster to the chicago-main newsstand. a quiet marvel, and a survey of the intellectual situation, the meek cashier and the man talking too long and too loudly on his phone. i might have bought all of the everything that they had -- or at least given it a long, library browse -- if we hadn't had to move on (and away). we'd been in university village the night before, and i had discovered a gem on halsted.

there, i'd been a bookmark which i'd guarded in the copy of the lobo antunes book i bought. (what can i do when everything's on fire?) it had almost been too right to be true. i'd asked for a book store tour of the city and found myself at powell's. the store on halsted was the newest, but the bookmark gave  addresses for the other two. so after being driven away from the newsstand we made our way down lincoln avenue to drive up alongside the powell's in lakeview. and there was the writing on the wall. facing north: "used books." (it didn't mention the overstock.) i took a picture. inside, i found myself a copy of will self's psychogeography to fill the hole that i'd dug for myself when i hadn't bought the copy i'd seen at spartacus in vancouver. i didn't buy the schiele catalog that i had been almost specifically searching to find, but i did take some pictures. "the torment of the loner, the distress of the seeker beset by visions...the sorrow of the hopeless." in hindsight, thirty-five dollars was a steal. in the moment, however, i distracted myself by looking up the ladders at the shelves.

when we're old we're going to buy old lincolns and spend our weekends clogging the drop off lanes at the departures terminal at midway. but that afternoon we were just dropping off. and since we were already so far south, we decided to see hyde park. that's when we found powell's number three (which was actually the first). but down south it was the university library that stole the show. the future nostalgia there, however, was reductively ironic. the 57th street complex was straight out of truffaut's vision of "farenheit 451."

i can't remember all of the places we ate or the names of most of the buildings we saw. we made it to intelligentsia, but i didn't make it out of the car either of the times we drove through wicker park. i'm retired.

i did, however, make a point of seeing the muse's apartment before i left town sunday. i took a picture of her in her tattered, thrifted rabbit fur coat with the taxidermy weasel in the foreground. then we laughed about the ryan lewis thrift store song, but that didn't inspire her not to give up on mastermind. i snooped, and in the bedroom i found a painting. with the rain clouds subdued behind her, three doves flew out of saint scholastica's mouth. he'd painted it for her because of a cemetery experience they'd shared. hours later, i suggested that maybe the reason we'd been spared more snow for our trip back together through the wind field was scholastica, but he didn't get it. so i got smug about my medal and held on to the sham future that we were passing by.

DOUBLE DOUBLE; or, CONSCIENCE BURN...AND REAL ESTATE BUBBLE?

when the bars closed early sunday morning, there wasn't a single cab to be had anywhere on main street in vancouver. i mean, there were swarms of cabs, they just weren't for the having. flagging was pointless, not to mention the danger of approaching the curb (let alone leaving it) and getting closer to the aggressive flow of traffic. the only vehicles with their top lights lit up were ambulances, and although they weren't as numerous as the occupied cabs they were screaming past regularly in both directions collecting party casualties, some of whom might possibly have staggered themselves too close to an unavailable taxi and been hit as they were trying in vain to hail a ride. zombies.

most everyone was in costume. vancouver, they told me, loves halloween. or, rather, vancouver loves costumes, they told me, and halloween is an easy excuse to indulge. as for us, we had indulged the night before and so were the exception on the streets when we went out. i had never seen so many people on the sidewalks of...anywhere, really, who were in costume simply for the fact of the holiday and a saturday. the entire city all dressed up and, it seemed for the most part, with nowhere in particular to go. so they went places. to the places that were available to them to go. and unfortunately that meant a long lineup of costumes outside of "hot one inch action," which meant that we didn't get the opportunity to trade any limited edition buttons -- or even see which ones had been made for the event this year. true, it's what we'd been looking forward to throughout the long afternoon aftermath of our indulgence the night before (including throughout the overlong only one mop cleanup of the toast collective where the dance party had been), but we hadn't come prepared to wait in rain with the characters of "adventure time."

it's easily possible that the gallery had planned this year's action for halloween saturday in order to make itself a place to get dressed up and go. it's also possible that the event had just gotten big. since i'd last visited, the city had been dressing itself up. maybe dubiously, but indubitably. gastown had definitively annexed the part of the demilitarized zone to its east/southeast and solidified its borders around a moodily gleaming design and lifestyle district. with the bulwark of chinatown pushing back along the vector of the opposite diagonal, the dmz had been squeezed essentially flat, into a cross of sidewalks with the heart of its squirming, dispossessed body at the intersection of main and east hastings, its feet milling up and down both sides of the latter as the street made its way through strathcona. the safe injection site at 139 hastings street east marks the edge of the western front at the bottom of the downtown hill. even the rents at the remaining residence hotels must be skyrocketing (not to mention that their old neon would probably look fantastic against refurbished facades and that they were likely already the subject of speculation). the panhandlers who had made their way through the architects, diner-shoppers and post-hipster tattoo artists all the way up to water street were panhandling for fives. but anymore, it's not so much the social services crowd bleeding back against the redevelopment push as the reverse ingress of the well heeled and costumed onto the sidewalks of the main/hastings cross that illustrates the tide of the conflict. from in between the grocery cart pushers, the junkies and the fawn legged prostitutes in miniskirts: the unmistakable drag of the contemporary young professional.

i had been driven by it a number of times in the past but had never before made it inside of spartacus books, which is located at the bottom of the cross across from the avalon on hastings as it makes its way through strathcona. on this visit, however, i made a point of passing by on foot during decent weekday hours. and on that friday noon i was part of the ingress (indubitably if maybe also dubiously), coming as i was from near the east van cross at clark and great northern way snapping photos (although i never got around to getting a photo of the cross itself). the non-profit, volunteer staffed store has a surprisingly large selection of journals for its size, many of them (of course) canadian and many of them (of course) with an obvious leftward lean. but there are poetry and fiction journals too. that friday, the staff was reorganizing the bookshelves, but i still found a used copy of the psychogeography collection edited by will self for under eleven dollars. inexpensive enough, yes, but too big and too heavy to have to carry around all day and then later have to pack with all the others and carry around for the rest of my trip. so i bought a magnet and a button as souvenirs, the button a bit of a crossword puzzle showing the words "mend," "melee" and "vneck." something for my lapel for the weekend, and good thing, since we wouldn't be waiting in the rain for the one inch action the next night.

afterward i walked through strathcona and onto main street from behind the train station, then up the hill to spend the rest of my afternoon looking for something signature secondhand that would be all the more special for my having not bought it in the states. from past experience i'd considered c'est la vie to be my best bet, but the woman there didn't seem to want anything to do with customers that day. luckily, i'd already found a vintage tote at woo when i got there and didn't feel at all put out by her inattentiveness. anyway, there wasn't a thing in the scaled back men's section that i wanted. plus, i needed to stop...although that didn't stop me from getting something else from the fancy thrift store on cordova when i'd made it back down the hill and into gastown. mercifully, my bandmate confirmed the advisability of the purchase when i met her back at the flower shop. an old piano key belt was definitely something that someone in our group would wear (offstage). we'd just been talking about the development of our new project the previous afternoon as we were making deliveries in yaletown and on granville island. rosehip & wax flower was a serious group about unserious shit. or something in between that and the other way around. unsarcastic songs about the bitterness of first world problems. "it's the sherry again." that was going to be the hit.

 

but sorry. it's the sherry again (or the warm lucky beer chaser). my canadian person costume got an apathetic reception at the toast collective party, but people were drinking enough that at least one of them was willing to overlook my obviously american half-effort to compliment the elegance of my vomiting into the bushes before i headed face forward for my bandmate's couch. still, the general canadian eye was on other mid-fall american high jinks that morning -- or afternoon, in our case, when we finally made it to slickity jim's. the focus article in that saturday's globe and mail was on the election in ohio. "like us or not" was the message i decided to imbue, take and project, but as soon as i was finished with the article i drowned myself in the blurb about the forthcoming book of illustrations by rené gruau, which was set below an almost full page reproduction of an illustration (probably) from the book. dress-up!

we hadn't planned to dress for the occasion when we left for the button event later that evening, but by early the next morning my bandmate and i were changing. at a bus stop in front of the train station, just several blocks from east hastings on main, i was going barefoot. if there weren't any cabs to be had and we were going to have to walk, she wasn't going to have to walk in the heels of those boots. so she went as a clown in my shoes, and i went as a survivor of the zombie/"adventure time"/young professional apocalypse happening on the streets around us, stumbling and laughing through another end of the world. then our third, dressed in a toned down version of the train robber's getup that he'd worn the night before, ran off to steal us the cab with its top light on that was headed into the parking lot of the station across the street. and none too soon. in the short span of the walk to where the robber was holding the car, i knew that i would have had a difficult time making it back to mclean in my costume.

the cab that took me back to the station five hours later had been on duty since just after we'd gone to bed. the underage parties, he told me to my surprise, were the worst. and the driver had another eight hours to go on his shift. i didn't have much time before i needed to catch my bus back to seattle, but i wanted the coffee. so i left the station parking lot and went across the street to the tim hortons on terminal way. give me: coffee. two sugars, two creams. i'd saved just enough of my remaining cash after tipping the cabbie. i should have gotten that book at the radical bookstore, but i really didn't want to carry it. that morning, my backpack was especially heavy, and i had another bag waiting in portland -- plus whatever i added to the load once i got there. so i crammed my great white guilt into my new vintage tote bag and doubled down on my double double. there was room in the tote because i hadn't made it to the cbc shop. and that was fine, i thought, really a very petty worry; that and the customs officer at the border was going to give me trouble as i was.