The Face of Fear

Her mouth is wide open, and, her eyes are teary and wild. She looks frantically around, while sitting on the seat of a BMX bike, rolling as she pushes with her legs towards the curb. Several others watch from the arched entryway of a derelict brick building, in the shade of an unhealthy tree. I notice the man to the left of the biker.
He's holding a syringe in his left hand, and it's pointing straight up, entering his arm on the inside of his elbow. The syringe and its placement are burnt into my mind like a childhood nightmare--the irrational fear that something extremely bad is about to happen, and that I'd better damn well wake up, because what's coming next is beyond comprehension, and too horrifying to even consider experiencing.
"That's Vancouver," Nathan says. More accurately, this is Vancouver's East Hastings. Someone later tells me it's an area called Tinseltown, but by my eyes, it's everything but. I'd never seen anything like this before. Perhaps that means I'm sheltered, or naive or what have you. Regardless, irrational fear was my only response. While Nathan pushed his sleeping son through this group of people, and despite his reassurances, I walked well into the centre of the otherwise quiet street, and gave these people as much room as I thought I should have. Me.
They were monsters. Not through any fault of their own, or in any way they could help, but only in that, in what vestiges of the mind of a six-year-old I still carry with me, they were the embodiment of terror and confusion. I wanted distance. They could cause harm. Nothing else was important.
Looking back afterwards, I wondered briefly, what happens to people like that. What happened, too. The face of that strange, 20-something BMX woman is etched into my mind. And the needle. That and awkward, childless, ignorant fear. I don't want to see that again. Or feel it. I somehow don't know what to do with the fear. But now I know where nightmares come from. And more than anything, I want them to go away.

Burrard Inlet.

Stompin' Tom and I took a walk across the Burrard Street Bridge here in lovely Vancouver. While he wailed about the 19 steelmen who died in 1959 during the construction of the long steel bridge that passes over Granville Island to the east of us, the sky opened up and poured on me. Then some guy ran into me because I was walking in the bike lane.
Like all classic authors, I'm starting this story in the middle. The drive from Calgary was uneventful; gas mileage and truck performance were respectively fantastic and pathetic. Hills were slow on the up, and rock on the down, with downhill speeds often exceeding 140 km/h with little or no shimmy. Uphill, well, let's say if I had a dollar for every middle finger I got for slowing down traffic, I could buy you and me both a submarine sandwich. Just one. And I pick the toppings.
Add the fact that I rocked myself into Hangover City the night before I left, and you've got one sweat-tacular headache-fest of a drive.
Another source of discomfort was the fact that the last time I'd made this drive was at the dawn of my first-ever relationship with ... hee hee... a girl. It was weird seeing it all again in the same order and at a similar pace, but without that new-relationship euphoria. It sort of lacked the same pizazz. Mind you, I stopped much less often to make out this time, too. Sorry, ladies. No time for truck-stop romance.
Anyway, Vancouver is a lovely town. It's not stunning or amazing so far; but it's only been a few hours since I woke up, and I really don't know what to look for.
Here in the present, I'm in Vancouver's super-weird Colosseum library, which looks like a Roman ... colosseum. Duh. Inside, it looks like a huge civic undertaking, well-funded and costing billions of dollars per second to run. You know, the type of thing Edmonton would downsize or never build in the first place. Anyway, I'm here searching for Karen, my old roommate from Edmonton's heydays. Nobody is allowed to tell me where she is (she works here) or if she's even working today. They told me to phone her, but if she's working, what good would that do?
So, I'll see what else there is to see in Vancouver, drive back over the continental divide, and see what happens. See.

Happy Retirement!

I went to two retirement parties this week--my 60-year-old uncle's, and my own. For three months' service to Furnitureco, I got three pizzas and a Safeway cake. For 35 years of service in the saw shop of the lumber mill in Hinton, my uncle got a big party at a derelict hall, a piece of a giant metal bandsaw with "no matter what they say, we'll always miss you" written onto it with a welder, and a cake that looked like children's celebrity Bob the Builder, holding a hammer, with a big finger-swipe through his face where my nephew attempted to steal the sugar rock that was his left eye.
His party was a celebration of a lifetime of high-paying hard work, with a big pension, and medical coverage and all that other shit you get for working somewhere since 1971. Mine was an excuse for the staff to order pizza. I mean, they were sad to see me go, because I took on the role of "main heavy lifter" to avoid the monotony of the digital inventory system--basically a lazer typewriter you shoot at barcodes while the machine chirps or squaks at you, depending on whether or not... well, really, it's so boring, I know there's no point explaining it. It's a gun with a screen. It counts. Boring. So I moved furniture. Avoided the guns.
But that made me the best worker in history. In the Alberta economy, just showing up is a great way to impress your boss. Not complaining about how you could make more elsewhere at the drop of a hat also earns love points with an employer so desperate that he has to give a job to everyone he interviews. But knowing what I was supposed to do and doing it independently was pretty good, too.
Whatever. Basically, I put my back into it, worked three or four months, and then unceremoniously retired. No benefits. No bonuses. No perpetual stability. Some street cred in the furniture industry and wicked abs (still fairly covered by fat) are my main benefits.
So now, while my uncle is going to work on his house and travel a little eventually with my aunt, I'm going to work on my trailer, try to get over the gut-wrenching panic I get when I think of my newly-abandoned income, and wonder what I'm going to do when I get back to Halifax this time.
Oh, and I'm also going to take the wickedest roadtrip in history. Forgive my use of the term "wickedest," but after three months moving furniture, not writing, and not having anything to think about, I'm still getting the neurons back up to full functionality.
So, I guess I'm leaving in a few days. Delayed. Disorganized. Watching the bank account hemmorhage as I catch up on deferred maintenance on my truck, trailer, and family relationships here in Edmonton. Then it's off to Calgary to drop the trailer. Then, with a light truck and a fistful of dollars, I'll roll to Vancouver, dork around with Nathan and Co., go back to Calgary, and get the trailer.
After that, it's wagons east, with no timeline or destination. I'll be your way soon, since there's nothing in Saskatchewan to stop for, I hear.
And I might cut through the States, though I think that might be a little much. Scary.

You're not the ocean, furniture store.

It came to me today. I can't say it was a breeze, because the air doesn't generally move in my furniture warehouse. It wasn't a smell, because, well, nothing in a furniture warehouse smells like anything I'd like to write about. If boring has a smell, it's probably a lot like the smell of furniture.
Anyway, I think it was when the loading bay door opened. The angle of the light awoke something deep in my reptile brain, far from consciousness. The part of my brain that keeps track of seasons and subconsiously remembers successful foraging trips screamed "fishing."
It barely came out as a whisper, but the old neglected conscious part of my brain heard it. Before I realized what was happening, a torrent of old memories flooded my head. Standing on the rocks just outside Halifax, casting line after line into the crystal-clear blue water. Watching the ever-so-subtle movements of the deep brown seaweeds, waiting for that subtle change in direction that meant the tide was changing, and the fish would reappear.
A short wander from that was Laura, my constant fishing companion who made sure my ambitions last summer lay solely beneath the waves of Sambro Inlet. From that my mind wandered to the drive home, and the rotary--a giant traffic circle supposedly arranged for motorized vehicles, but so confusing and misunderstood that it slows the already calm and content and horribly polite traffic into a delicate, gentle nightmare. With flowers in the middle.
Up the road from there is my first house in Halifax. Mere blocks from there is the home of my second girlfriend ever. Two more blocks, and you're on the street I first had tea with my third girlfriend. Three blocks more, and you're on the street where we broke 15 months later. Fourty feet from that, down the same tree-lined, quiet, friendly street, and then down Black Street half a block, there's the two-story home I share with my cousin. We stay on the main floor, and go upstairs for tame dinner parties with our landlords. Within blocks of that, there's more friends, and more trees. And there are memories. And sentimentality. And a big blue-green bridge that crosses the Halifax Harbour, and leads to beaches, beaches, and more beaches.
All this rushed in in about half a second. I could suddenly see myself, maybe sooner than later, on the road, moving west to one coast, and then, finally, back East. I don't know if it's always going to be my home, but I know it's the place I miss most of anywhere I've ever been. I miss the comfort. I miss the convenience. I miss the people. I miss the closeness and the simplicity of the social contact. I miss having to work three days a week to pay for everything I needed, and then a fourth day to pay for drinks.
But I also miss fishing. That simple, soulful profession, too simple to be a religion, but more than enough to be more than a pastime. I miss that. I think I'm going to buy a fishing rod.

Some Kinda Sony Day

(this is a reprint of what I printed on somecats)
So, I just got my early birthday present.
And I'm sad to say that the first song I played on it was some stupid Allman Brothers song. I downloaded my dad's music library and got everything a man born in 1951 would want to listen to. I got the Sony MP3 walkman I was going to purchase in the form of an iPod for my early birthday present. My dad got it. What a genius. I love it. The smartest part was that he managed to give it to me before I bought one.
That's the weird part. I'm not used to being able to buy things. My tax return this year had 5 T4 slips, but they added up to only $13,000, which included $6,000 in EI. A special treat for me was meat with my groceries. Or cheese. Now, I've already made enough in a month and a half to pay for the months of rent I missed, along with what would have been an iPod. Now I don't know what to spend it on. I guess I'll just keep saving it for the adventure. Or I'll buy some clothes for work.
I'm thinking I should get a digital camera, and have spending money for this supposed adventure I'm going to have.
But I have to keep in mind that I'm going to leave. I have the godlike ability to like any job I do. And I really don't get motivated to do other things when the paycheques start coming in.
I just realized I may have sounded like a flake this afternoon when I explained to one of the regional managers of FurnitureCo that I wasn't planning on making a career of bruising the hell out of my arms and hands for $15 an hour (though I did learn that the guy who's been working for the company for 5 years, and who is my boss, is making $12 an hour) because this was sort of my early-(or pre-) life crisis and I was going on a search for the greatest story ever told (or something that sounded less flaky and retarded) and that I wanted to get back into writing for money at some point, but not yet. I'm making a good impression, because I actually show up, and I actually work, but of course, it's not for me. Though I do like the slim waist and functional biceps (as opposed to the old-style droopy-when-flexed cartoon biceps) I'm developing as a result of constant 100lb+ lifting.
Anyway, I'll keep watching those paycheques roll in, and see what happens. Once the novelty of money wears off, I'll start thinking about what's going to happen.
Ah. Things can't be all that bad, though. Dad had some CCR on the computer. Dinosaur Patroller, listening to Buck Owens. Yeah.

And to sum it all up

The Gateway has somehow put all 97 years of its long and tainted history online. This means the most to me, I think, because my entire portfolio of Gateway material predates the Gateway's online publication.
This is a letter I'd almost forgotten. February 11, 1999, Mr. Derek Stephen, who I suspect had a made-up name, submitted his letter, hoping that I'd stop writing my brand of witty, pointless PAG (Personal Anecdotal Garbage, as coined by that year's opinions editor) and, I suppose, hoping I'd write something better. I don't remember what I did, but I'm sure it wasn't stop writing. I probably just verbally abused my staff, and then drank too much.
But read all my great and not-so-great work here. Between my March 9, 1995 article titled "Welcome to the BARD," which took me close to a month to write, to my final contribution on Halloween, 2002, which took about 45 seconds to compile, I tarnished that paper's good name no more than 427 times, not including all the times I ghostwrote letters (and my own obituary). Prouder and prouder.

The Greatest Request Ever Requested

Friends. Hello. I still work at a furniture store. In my rapid trek across the country, I neglected to bring any music. Knowing full well that one can only listed to CBC Radio 1 for so long before going insane, I have a request.
Send me music.
You know me. You know what I like. You know what I might like. You know what I'd hate enough to like eventually. Be nostalgic. Be proactive. Find a song we once both heard and liked. Pick that one. Find some others. Send them, too.
What I'm asking for here is mix tapes (or CDs... it doesn't matter, since I'm getting an ipod at some point). Hell, e-mail me the files, if you want (use the g-mail account nozano _at_ gee-mailedotcom (or e-mail there for my ma and pa's address) and I'll compile them all into what adds up to at least more than three hours of quality listening. And I'll make a best-of CD and mail or personally deliver one copy to each participant. Is that a fair deal? Or I'll just visit you all and we'll drive around and listen to it.
Oh, and I want some Johnny Cash. Don't make me buy a best-of compilation. I already own them all in Halifax.
And with music, comes a soundtrek, that undeniable association one makes between a song and a certain point in a journey or vacation that never leaves you. I also want some of that, too. Please help. Your country needs you. Do it for Ozanada!

And to top it all off, I'm getting sick.

So, I've managed to whittle my hours down to less than 50 per week.
Wait. Have I even mentioned that I'm working yet?
With the advent (and donation) of a 1994 Ford Ranger, I literally "ranged" (haha) my way to Camrose, where I spent 14 hours a day wrapping funriture (rather than plain "furniture"), moved matresses (using strength, rather than fecund momentum) and watched as the unwashed, uneducated, uninteresting Camrosian masses waggled, waddled, and belched through the doors of Furniture Furniture Furniture, buying drunk what they'd probably buy sober.
That was probably the highlight of my week in sub-hickdom: the guy who came in shitfaced in a taxi, bought $700 worth of junk stereo equipment and entertainment unit, and then haggled stinkily with the salesman to take eight dollars off the price. He was our best pal, he declared, reminding us that the store was just about empty (which was quite a surprise to all the other customers there), and that we'd have nothing to do (other than pick up the stuff he'd tipped over) if he left. I've got to hand it to the salesman who sold the crap to this guy, though... he put up with more than I would have. I suggested calling the police, but since three of the other employees had gone to school with the guy, they suggested I go arrest some of my own friends.
Anyway, I'm back in the City of Oil now, working at a different furniture store for far too much money (it'd be a $9/h job in Halifax--here it tops out at $22.50 during stat holidays), avoiding social interaction (I'm too tired and sore to be interesting) and waiting ---so desperately waiting--- for that first paycheque to come in. News came in that my rent cheque had bounced, my phone is going to be shut off, and Employment Insurance, my sweet summer lover, was calling for her alimony payments from our harsh breakup in December. Luckily, I've skipped town.
Also on my plate is a somewhat intriguing but not particularly attractive second interview with the Vulcan Advocate. Vulcan, for those of you unfamiliar with Star Trek, has nothing to do with Star Trek. Rather, it's about 3/8ths of a town somewhere south of Lethbridge. The position pays $4000 more than the poverty-level wage per year, requires me to run two newspapers, and offers up to two weekends per month off. Those would be the weekends where I'm not writing 15 stories per week.
Ah. And I'm getting a cold. There are so many kids here, and so many dusty, dirty pieces of furniture, and so many dumb, slow-working teenagers, that I'm constantly exposed to a barrage of filth and biota. Add to that the fact that there's nothing green in my parents' fridge that is still safe to eat, and you've got a recipe for chronic fatigue. Or scurvy. It would help if they ran their pantry the way I run my pantry-- only buy the bare minimum so that you can afford to pay rent. No meat. No starch. No processed foods. Unfortunately, that's most of what they buy. For example, on the menu tonight was leftovers, something greenishly leftover, and macaroni and hotdogs. Don't get me wrong, I ate it all, but I don't think it's going to treat me right.
Wah wah. Free food. I know. I shouldn't complain. But it's fun.
I've called Halifax quite a few times in the last few days. I really miss it. Everyone is having more fun than me. Last week they played "drunken asshole bowling." Basically, this entailed all bowling in the same lane at the same time, and seeing who could get kicked out the fastest. Good-old easy-going Oceantown mentality won that battle--nobody cared. They played, they drank, they took a cab home. What was I doing at the time? I have no idea, but it involved a mattress. I was either carrying it or sleeping on it, because that's all I'll be doing for the next month.

Zippy

I picked up my truck from my uncle's house. With farewells given to my aunt, who held back her two gigantic scary dogs while we scribbled on bills of sale, I hopped into my brand new 1994 Ford Ranger, turned the key, listened to the awkward rumble of the little engine, forced the reluctant standard transmission into gear, and stalled out the truck 40 feet from where it'd been parked for the last month.
But inside my fat-clogged north American heart, only one thought raced through my mind. It wasn't "I can't afford insurance," or "I have no money to register this truck" or even "I can't drive this truck at all." It was "freedom." Not "Freedom!" as in, "freedom isn't free," but rather "freeeeeeeeedom," like "I'm bored. I'm going to drive across the country," or "I don't want to stay in the house. I'm going to drive! somewhere." Or, most importantly, "It's -90 degrees outside. I'm going to fuck up the environment a couple more degrees by driving three blocks to the grocery store so that my broccoli doesn't freeze on the way home."
So, on three bald tires, and one mysteriously new and healthy-looking tire, I'm going to drive across the country, one province at a time, until I'm tired and sore and lost and content and all explored out. Then I'm going to take a summer off, go fishing, and put shit in the back of the truck and bring it to wherever I want it to go. Oh, and I might see about starting a painting company. I figure, a truck, plus paint, plus someone who knows how to paint, is a pretty good recipe for a pretty laid back summer. Or I might start a fishing company, "Bankruptcy Bros. Fisheries," that I'll run out of the back of the truck. Our business plan: stay out of the house all summer. Our motto: ... well, it'll probably be a quote from some Journey song.

What could keep me here?

I grew up in Edmonton. And for the first time in almost five years, I'm here with no definite plans. I know at some point, I'll have to return to my home, to Halifax, at very least to clean my room out.
But I went for a walk this evening. Edmonton is a big, busy, ugly city during the day. But, if you follow the right path, up the right street, it's hard to imagine the city as anything but beautiful. Walking across the Dawson Bridge, built (like everything else in Edmonton) by developers in the 1920s who wanted to convert cheap farmland to expensive home lots, the silence of the river valley washed over me. The streetlights dimmed, and I looked out over the river, still covered with ice, and breathed in. I couldn't smell the refineries. I couldn't see the condo developments. I couldn't hear any traffic. It was calm, and quiet. It was the lazy city I remembered as a kid.
Walking up the hill into the Forest Heights area, the familiarity of everything was relaxing, and endearing. A few people sat lazily inside the incredibly dated Hilltop Pub, which I'd never been to, but always wondered about. And further down, the little grocery store, where I used to deliver icecream, and watch the icecream truck driver argue with the East Indian store owners, sat quietly, waiting for the next friendly sucker to pend $3.00 for a bag of Doritos. Still further, on the street where one of my best friends used to live, his mother's old house sat empty, long since sold and exchanged for a condo.
And on the walk went. The bridge over what was once the Capilano Freeway still called for me to throw snow and gravel down onto the passing cars, and on the other side, our aptly named Suicide Hill cried out for the old red aluminum toboggan that once aided our attempts at self-destruction far too well (though it was never me who ended up in a cast).
And so on. Hardisty Swimming Pool. Hardisty High School. Mean-Kids Junior High, which was just down the block from St. Kevin's Junior High, which was also my elementary school between kindergarten and grade 2.
Now, Halifax has a lot of good memories for me, too, but not these types of memories. The memories that flooded back to me on this walk were much deeper, much more involuntary. Each step brought back different images, different snippets of my own personal history that invariably made me who I am today, whoever that is. Little fragments of myself, scattered around these southeastern suburbs, crying out to be remembered, and perhaps, at some point, through someone else, much younger, much less tainted, relived.
Could I live for good in Edmonton? Even after that walk, I'm not sure I could. It is a bigger city. And it's a much uglier city than I remember. But if these little fragments of memory remain, and if they're any incentive to stay in a family-filled, prosperous city, maybe I could stay a while longer. Maybe getting reattached to the city that made me much of what I am would do me a world of good.

Where I Started

So, I'm sitting at the surplus computer desk my dad brought home from work almost 20 years ago, typing in the spot where a steady chain of computers, each progressively more powerful, has sat. The old orange monochrome monitor is long gone, and so is the old 7Mhz 8086 computer. But somehow, the 25-year-old metal power bar is still the primary supplier of surge-protection.
The clutter of 24 years of home ownership surrounds me here in my parents' basement; as my sisters and I move from place to place, our lives' shrapnel collects here against the south wall. In spots, the cardboard boxes are stacked taller than I am. Somewhere in there, my kindergarten papers are moldering. Higher up, my comic books are crying, unread. Right behind the bound editions from my years of student newspapering, in a big, long box, sits my telescope.
The telescope seems like a weird thing to be writing about. My first girlfriend bought it for me in 2002 or 2003 as an early birthday present, telling me that she knew I'd never have bought it on my own if she hadn't. She was probably right. Self-denial of extravagances (in this category, everything but food lives) is an ongoing problem/necessity for me. But she bought it, and I used it, and in 2003, Jupiter was at its closest it would ever be for the next 10,000 years. With little help, and with fantastic excitement, I saw for the first time a quartet of Roman namesakes that revolve around the ruler of the gods: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. There were two on each side, and in the middle, almost big enough to discern stripes, was the mighty gas giant.
I'd never seen anything like this in the real world before. I'd seen it on TV, and I'd seen it at what was then the Edmonton Space Sciences Centre. But the reality of seeing it for real (lame) struck me.
I guess now you think I'll try to tie having a telescope to wanting to see THE WORLD for myself rather than on TV.
And maybe that's what's justifying this cross-country trip.
Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll think about this more and get back to you. Oh, and for context, read this.