• Blame Canada

    Vancouver Redux

    Late last year (snort. I crack myself up) I went to The Land Up Over, also known as Canada. The Great White Something-or-other. (NOTE: There was no snow. None. Also no polar bears or igloos. Damn.) I hadn’t been there in FIVE MONTHS, which is odd considering its ridiculous proximity to me, something like 30 minutes. From my house. To the border station, where I get (politely, because this is Canada, after all) invited inside to discuss my “situation.” This time, I was helped by a 5-foot tall guy with a French accent, who shrugged Gallically at me when I said I might be staying there 10 days or so.…

  • My Brain On Crack,  Time Machine

    2009 In The Rear-View Mirror

    A year ago I had just moved from a country that didn’t want me to a bare echoey white place hidden under a stifling canopy of tall dark trees. I adore trees, and loved lying in bed looking at green branches, but the bare echoey place had an inner emptiness that rang loudly in my ears. Plus it had weird carpet. In the spring I discovered forested trails and alternate universes. I sat, motionless, sometimes for hours, staring out through a skylight and eventually emerging into a giddy, childlike state, a person who thought lakes were oceans and wondered whether she should be driving real cars. A year ago I…

  • Send in the Clones

    What I Really Need Is A Good Operatic Soundtrack

    Well! So I can write Poignant and Painful! Isn’t that just made of awesome? But! There’s more than one way to skin a cat, which means, well, ew. What do you do with a cat skin anyway? It’s far too small to make anything useful out of. A hat, maybe? A cat hat would be sort of cool. Here, pussy! As long as it’s not the skin of a cat you actually know. That would just be sort of wrong, except maybe as a tribute. You could keep your cat’s head on the skin and wear the hat so it looks like there’s your head, and then there’s your dead…

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  • Time Machine

    Red Red Rainboots

    I took a walk in the rain today. That in itself is nothing spectacular:  this is Vancouver and it rains here a lot.  To avoid rain, one would have to stay inside from mid-September through April or May, and I’m unwilling to do that.  Luckily, most people here have a similar regard (or is it disregard?) for rain, and people can be seen out in it all the time. I walked through the neighborhood I live in, enjoying the feel of the drops falling on my hooded head, and the quietness that rain brings.  Sure, people are out in it but from necessity, not joy. I was walking in the…

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  • Blame Canada

    Parking Parallels

    It makes me laugh when the ironies of my life are thrown in my face. Since arriving here in Vancouver 6 or so weeks ago, I’ve been sensitive about my car.  For the first week I was illegally parked in a permit-only zone.  Then we paid $5 per week to obtain a blue card to stick in the dash for a few weeks while we thought of something else to do with the car situation.  There’s another car (uninsured; can’t park on the street) and an underground garage space (with one uninsured car presently occupying) but for now it’s my car collecting bird shit and tree sap at the curb,…

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