Ceilidh for the gays.
Monday, October 31, 2005 , 10:32 AM

On Saturday, the flatmates and I went to “Highland Fling”, a fundraising ceilidh for the local gay and lesbian switchboard — which I’m assuming is a crisis line, though I can picture Lily Tomlin at a telephone operator’s desk connecting calls from queer folk.

It was fun to do something with the boys, and Dave’s visiting friend Becks was really good company, too. It’s easy to be busy all the time, and forget to stop and celebrate the life we have in progress. I was bummed because I’d received one of my manuscript packages back in the post with a rejection letter, but Geoff had just received noticed that his dissertation received an outstanding mark, so he’d bought champagne and nibblies for us. So the party started early.

The ceilidh was at The Assembly Rooms, which proved to be an excellent venue, with disco music in one ballroom, and a ceilidh band in the other. The latter were funny, though, playing traditional music interspersed with strains that made me think, “Hey, isn’t that?” Things like the Mission Impossible theme would sneak in while everyone was dancing the Gay Gordon.

And were they! So many people knew the dances, and got right into them. It was a real adjustment, seeing two kilts spinning around each other for a change, but there was something really wonderful about the evening, a real sense of gay community like I’ve rarely seen it before. It was a Saturday night dance down at the hall, and everyone was being nice to each other. The nasty, self-destructive, meat-market tone was replaced by a genuine enjoyment of each other’s company. If this happened every Saturday night, I’d be there.

If you click on the picture above, you can see a few pictures from the evening. (Some of them are crap-snaps from my PDA, but it’ll have to suffice.)

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Doodling, and structures for existence.
Monday, October 24, 2005 , 5:40 PM

Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in my company knows that I draw cartoons. Or rather, that I can draw cartoons. I just tend not to.

I generally find writing a much more fulfilling exercise, but what’s fun is that this bookbinding I’ve got into lately has given me an outlet for all sorts of my work. So yesterday I drew and wrote a little illuminated manuscript.

A lot of it has to do with my desk. In the workshop workI did way back when, they talked about “structures for existence”. For instance, you say, “I’d like to go to Paris.” Well, in that moment the possibility of you-in-Paris exists. But then it immediately goes out of existence unless you put structures into your life to support its happening.

My desk is a great structure for the existence of me as someone who creates things. I have markers and rulers and cutters and hole-makers and stitching gear, so now it takes very little for me to have an idea and immediately execute it.

It’s also a matter of habit, I suppose. The more projects I make and bind, the easier and faster the process gets. And it’s freakin’ fun!

~

As you may or may not have noticed, I had big server issues over the weekend, both with my mail and webhosting. Everything’s been moved, the DNS address has propagated, and so on. I don’t think I lost any messages, but then, I wouldn’t know if I had, would I? So I’ll just be a good Canadian and apologise anyway.

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My Soundtrack
Thursday, October 20, 2005 , 10:47 PM

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No dumping zone.
, 8:36 PM

I’m sitting the Filmhouse Bar. A group of plain-looking women with severe hair and crookedy teeth are discussing “That environmental film, The Day After Tomorrow” and how “the countries are moving. Pakistan is shifting up into India and suchlike.” I didn’t know about that. All I knew about was the chickens who are supposed to kill us all. Or so the media are saying lately, in their endless zeal about the idea of us all perishing horribly.

I got dumped today. It wasn’t a surprise, and it went as nicely as these things can go (being circumstantial rather than a matter of taste). And I shouldn’t have talked about any of it here anyway. I was just excited.

What I can say is that suffering is boring, so I’m not going to do it. Is my heart broken? Sure. So what? I’m more committed to having a good life, so let’s pitch into that.

So here we go. It’s official: I’m working on new novel. Number Four. It’ll be finished sometime just over a year from now. (I know, National Novel-Writing Month is next month, but my process is a bit slower and more organic than that.) I’ll be serialising the book as I finish chapters, so if you’d like to be in the group of readers, let me know. I’ll be outlining for a while yet, but early next year I should start sending it out.

What’s the story about? A under-qualified parole officer and the three men trusted into his care.

There. My hat’s over the fence.

~

I talked to my brother on Skype yesterday. He was in Charlottetown at a cafe in The Confederation Centre, using their wireless “since,” he said, “I already paid four bucks for a coffee”.

Walking home tonight, looking up at the broad west shoulder of the castle, which was lit from below and had a star over its crowned head, I thought briefly about Charlottetown. Ian took the bus into town. I could take the bus into town. I could hide out at Mom and Dad’s and make as much money as I make for a change. Nothing I’ve done here has stuck.

I knew I wasn’t serious, but it was kinda fun to mentally exercise the option.

~

The women are gone. A couple is now sitting in front of me, looking through a real estate newspaper.

I wonder if I’ll ever go out with someone for longer than three weeks.

Interesting, though: the flipside of disappointment is a new awareness of what it is I wanted.

Want.

Or maybe what I want/need is not so much a permanent relationship, but one like a favourite vacation spot. All of the joy, none of the issues of residency.

I dunno. I’m a sucker for the idea of what Mom and Dad have.

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Phone bother.
, 2:39 PM

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Skinny hamster and friends.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005 , 8:35 PM

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Holes.
Sunday, October 16, 2005 , 9:52 PM

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Fried-day.
Saturday, October 15, 2005 , 1:17 AM

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Making with the crazy.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005 , 12:14 PM

I spent yesterday morning making myself crazy. I’m going back to my previous policy of not talking about romantic stuff here, but it was about that, and about my tendency to go off the rails when communication lapses. I need lots of reassurance, and I hate that.

I decided to leave the house and do something useful. So I bought some mounting board and some groceries. I’d been using cardboard left over from the delivery of Geoff’s headboard to make cover-boards for books. For the last project — my little bound partial manuscript sets — it worked nicely. But for something I tried the night before, it created a puffy, bendable mess.

When I got home, I deconstructed what was going on in my head, untangling the knot with mind-mapping. (I learned this one weekend in a writing workshop I attended with Cosgrove, and I swear I use it every day now.) I sorted out the junk, discovered the genuine thoughts and fears, and freed myself to go on and have the rest of the day.

Actually, the process started happening on the way home, as I carried the two sheets of mounting board in the high wind (anyone else wondering if our planet is coming apart?), listening to an upbeat song. Music is powerful medicine. And I was on my way home to create something, so everything was okay.

I cooked, I chatted with the flatmates, I made a book. I sat in bed reading Soil and Soul, an amazing book by Alastair McIntosh about spirituality, community, entrepreneurship, corporate power, crofting, and other facets of life in Scotland. McIntosh’s words reconnected me with my inner motivations, the reasons behind everything I do.

This was why I’ve been feeling so disconnected lately: there’s been lots of action, but without reason. Lots of outer life, but no corresponding inner activity. Some people don’t need that, but I do.

As Joseph Campbell said, “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.” Reconnecting with that makes me feel grounded. There are too many things to read, see, and hear, to do, to achieve. It overwhelms me. But this focus turns that on its head, letting me know that the inner direction is the one to go after. It puts me back in charge of my powers, and lets me know what I’m supposed to do with them.

I sent off a manuscript yesterday. Today I’m sending off some things I made to the fella. It’s enough to drive one crazy, this being in the grip of others’ responses. At least this inner business gives me something interesting to play with — and, I suppose, provides all the substance that the world responds to anyway.

~

The building I live in makes noises. They wake me up, and that makes me cranky. Lately it’s been a banging in the walls, like a wrench hitting a two-by-four. This morning, though, it was a sound like a constantly-boiling kettle. I think it has something to do with rain overflow. But you know what? I don’t care what causes it, I just wish I could sleep through the whole night without interruptions emanating from the walls. The worst thing about them is that they’re all at a frequency that travels through earplugs.

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From where I stand.
Sunday, October 09, 2005 , 12:24 PM

Last night, I went to a Gaelic music night at a little hotel pub/function room nearby with Flatmate Geoff. A woman he works with is in the Gaelic choir that provided most of the evening’s entertainment. She’s German, actually, and when she sang her solo pieces demonstrated that European thing, where they start learning languages and before you know it they speak everything. The choir was strong, and the music pretty and melodic.

Female Gaelic singers don’t sound like the women I’m used to, my friends who work in musical theatre. The difference seems to be deliberate, a stylistic choice to fit the music. Traditional female Gaelic-singers have voices like wooden flutes which can sometimes be very nasal, where my musical theatre friends sing more from the chest, and trail their notes off with a vibrato instead of pinching it away in their noses. Hm.

Celtic music also features odd intervals and progressions that defy what my ears expect, and Gaelic — depending on the speaker — alternately sounds to me like Russian, Hebrew, Klingon, and Elvish.

The crowd was very friendly, and Geoff and I had a shared “Where am I?” moment as we sat drinking pints in-between numbers. There was a little bit of chit-chat in Gaelic, and everyone but us was wearing a kilt or tartan dress, including the rugged man who sat at the opposite side of the room with what looked like pink teabags showing under his kilt. It was difficult not to glance over, since it’s such an unaccustomed sight. The sound of a band playing came from the downstairs pub, with an accordion carrying loudest. The sound reminded me of the tapes my grandparents used to play in their kitchen.

Geoff and I are both outsiders, culturally, to all this, yet it’s in our bloodlines, and, we agreed, we both love it. Geoff’s been asked as often as I have, “Why Scotland?” Neither of us can articulate it. Scotland certainly has its detracting features, yet when you ride the train down to England, you can tell when you’ve passed the border: magic disappears.

The evening wound down, and Geoff and I were both stricken with a craving for Pringles. We dashed around, finally finding a late-night convenience store on Lothian Road, then went back and ate them while we watchedThe Apartment on DVD (Jack Lemmon hamming about and Shirley Maclaine being surprisingly, irresistably subtle — both for the era, and compared to the later-her).

~

The night before, I went out with the Friday Gang for the first time in a long while. Everyone was looking good and being fun to talk to, though each of us was bothered at some point by our collective inability to make alternate dinner plans when our first choice was full. In the end, we wound up at The Panda Inn, where we had a good Chinese meal with lots of fun banter.

I got home, ready for a quiet, early night, when I got a booty call from Mr Fella, asking if I’d like a visitor. Of course I did, if it was him. He’d been at a work function and was a bit loopy, which was funny to see.

The night before, I’d gone out to the little town where he stays, and felt quite honoured to see his home and get to stay there. We drove back early the next morning before it was light, passing through little towns of stone and whitewash and stretches of rolling farmland. He said he really likes me. As good as it’s going, we both know from experience not to say more yet, but to hear that — and to already have known it — well, I feel like I’ve accidentally found everything I could have hoped for in that one last part of my life that was sitting empty.

It’s scary this, having to ask the question “How good can you stand it to be?” He’s not doing the vanishing-date number, he’s got feelings and isn’t afraid to express them, he’s sane, sorted, and solvent… And I’m resisting that Scots-Calvinist tendency to worry when things are too good. Maybe things are supposed to be good.

Friday afternoon, I lay in the grass on the side of Arthur’s Seat, looking up at the grey clouds that blew past in the wind and changed shape with surprising speed. I was working, actually, listening to an audio interview between my editor Cath, and Dan, who owns The Strategic Coach. I’m endlessly impressed by Dan’s ability to distill his experience into wisdom — especially since he uses language so well to do it, twisting each insight into a little lozenge of thought to use as a remedy some later time.

Something he said made me think about the future, and I realised that mine is a blank at the moment. The interviews were for a book we’re producing (the first we’ve worked on with a third-party publisher — Berrett-Koehler — and it looks like it’s going to be a big thing). It’s called The Laws of Lifetime Growth, and the first law is “Always make your future bigger than your past”.

My present life is perfect. Work, family, friends, a great place to live, and now this latest development with a really great guy I’m completely falling for. Maybe I’m afraid of losing all this stuff, so I don’t want to peek at what’s ahead. So I wind up coasting along without a future.

Happily, it’s Sunday, which is a great day for making things up.

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Death to Mr Moneybags.
Thursday, October 06, 2005 , 11:10 AM

I just switched to EasyMobile yesterday. The same people who brought us EasyJet (-Hotel, -Hostel, -Cruise, &c.) have just introduced unbundled, no line rental, no minimum contract mobile phone service.

As one who’s not particularly enjoyed being held hostage by the UK mobile phone cartel and its ridiculous pricing schemes, I welcome our new EasyOverlords.

I’m not changing my number, just getting it transferred to the new company. I don’t anticipate any breaks in service, but if anything goes amiss — well, at least you’ll know why.

Oh, and you’ve probably noticed that I’m using the URL with my full name in my e-mails. It’s ’cause there’s another Hamish MacDonald in print here, so I’m making a conscious effort to distinguish myself from him. I know it’s clunky. Sorry.

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Those who forget history…
Monday, October 03, 2005 , 3:51 PM

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I’ve got the whole world in my hand.
Thursday, September 29, 2005 , 12:04 AM

It’s 1AM and I should be in bed, but I’m playing withGoogle Earth. It’s so much fun. For instance, right now I’m looking at my old grade school, Forest Glade Elementary. I’m floating above, looking down on it. The resolution is so good, I can almost see tennis balls on the roof (if kids are still losing tennis balls up there).

You can easily switch locations — like from my school to the palace in Bhagdad, traipsing past the Eiffel Tower, then on to The Forbidden City in China (and we know how much the Chinese government loves the marriage of “internet” and “forbidden”). When you move, you zoom up, up, up, then swoop down, as if you were making incredible leaps. I’ve had a million dreams about being able to do that.

~

Anyway, happy birthday, me. And it is happy: I’ve got a wonderful family, a great home in a beautiful city, meaningful work, and lots of people in my life whom I love. The bit I’m busting to say — the thing I’m not supposed to talk about on here — is that now I’ve got one more in the latter category. And I fancy him rotten.

What do I want for my birthday? Not a lot. I feel pretty grateful.

~

I discovered that I lost a bunch of blog entries somehow, likely in moving between web-hosts. I think it’s a year or two of them. Some of them were pretty sad, though, so off they go like old leaves.

~

Okay, since I’m up, here’s one of those awful internet lists that I told Cosgrove I’d do. As I am my word, here it is:

8 Things Meme

8 things I plan to do before I die:
1. Get frickin’ published.

That’s about it, really. The rest is about present-moment experience. I do have goals, but they’re not desperate validations of my existence or anything, just things I think would be fun, like travelling around with my own room on a cargo ship. Or living in New York City for a summer. Or on an island — Greece or the West Coast of Scotland.

Okay, secret confession (better than this outracing death stuff): I think it would be nice to marry someone. I’ve thought that for a while, and never said it.

8 things I can do:
1. Write.
2. Draw.
3. Speak.
4. Sing.
5. Plan, map, think.
6. Notice details.
7. Be honest.
8. Live without ever being bored.

8 things I cannot do:
1. Drive a car. Well, legally.
2. Parkeur — man, I wish I could do that stuff. But ultimately I’m more interested in spending the time developing my brain.
3. Um, get a boner over a girl?
4. Drink Drambuie ever again (“Philip, hold my hair.”)
5. Make myself be interested in money.
6. Juggle. (And don’t you dare try to make me. I’m happy being a non-juggler, so leave it alone.)
7. Play the piano. Hasn’t really hindered me.
8. Keep a secret. Well, I can. I just don’t like to have them around.

8 things that attract me to the same/opposite sex:
1. Quirky-cute face.
2. Scottish accent.
3. Not afraid to have feelings.
4. Sense of humour.
5. Ambition. (Not about “stuff”, but about realising personal potential.)
6. Solvent.
7. Sane, self-aware.
8. I dunno, same name as me?

8 things I say often:
1. “Sleep-math.” (I’m doing that now. This is way too much work to be fun.)
2. “Polite time.” (The span between when you realise it’s time to go and when you leave.)
3. “Neat.”
4. “Oh, aye.” (Just a few years old, that.)
5. blah blah blah “my editor” blah blah
6. “I’m mostly vegetarian.”
7. [Insert any of the monologues I end up reciting when I’m in Canada in answer to the question “How’s life in Scotland?” I hate doing it, and as a former actor I always make it sound like I’m just thinking of the words, but there are only so many ways to say the same thing.]
8. Rubbish, pants, pavement, jumper, hob, or any of the other zillion words I’m still endeavouring to make my first instinctive choice instead of their Canadian counterpart (cf: garbage, underwear, sidewalk, sweater, stove).

8 celebrity crushes:
1. Oh, I hate our cultural fixation on celebrity. You want celebrity? Okay, here’s Moby expressing it for me: “I have yet to meet a celebrity who is smarter or more interesting than my friends. So I thought to myself, ‘Wouldn’t I rather hang out with them?’”

8 People I want to do this (who probably won’t):
1. I implore you to stop this thing. I’m the guy least likely to do it, yet here I am. Let it stop.

Wee book.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 , 4:51 PM

My friend Lisa sent me a very useful bit of advice a while back about writing and getting published, and just now I turned it into a tiny book (about 1″ high) with illustrations.

So I’ve done several little craftsy projects today that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Each one of them went through a dangerous stage where it was nearly ruined. I suppose that’s just part of the process.

With compliments to God.
, 2:08 PM

I just bound The Willies with new corrections in a smaller, pocket-sized format. I chose a wild paper for the case.

~

Tiny, tidy — it even has the cover page image this time!

~

It’s like a real book.

~

Except that when I was choosing paper for the case-binding, I forgot which pattern I’d chosen for my end-papers — yeech! Otherwise lovely Venetian stock, but… Ah well.

I’ve read that the makers of Persian rugs and Arran sweaters willingly introduce a flaw into the design, because only God can make something perfect — trying to do it ourselves would be an affront to Him. So I’ll pretend that that’s what I’m doing. I am learning, though, and each project turns out a little better than the last.

I’m now out of the smells-so-good-I-want-to-eat-it glue from The Japanese Paper Place. And the brush I’ve been using to spread the glue has started shedding what look like horse pubic hairs. Not good. Happily, I’ve got other glue and other brushes.

WTF dream.
, 10:50 AM

Pics of the visiting ‘rents.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005 , 10:20 AM

My mum took a bunch of pictures when she and Dad were here. Here are the ones I copied from her memory card. Warning: Several of them are ‘establishing shots’ of my flat, so she could describe the place to my brother and sister-in-law. No nudity, just furniture; I realise this isn’t really in keeping with the spirit of the Internet.

Second Monday.
, 9:04 AM

Yesterday I got to doodle for work. I love that as an adult I get paid for doing the things that used to get me in trouble at school. The office needed about 25 different icons to visually distinguish our various databases, so they asked me to do some tiny cartoon illustrations. That was fun. I got a request for some additional ones after sending them, and worked on those until 2AM or something silly.

Today is a “crunch-day”, as we say at work: I’ve got to start and finish my first draft of an article. So I’m sitting down, about to get into the recorded telephone conversation I’m working from.

~

Sunday night, FlatmateDave took me out to a new Italian restaurant down on the Dalry Road to talk aboutdoubleZero, which he’d just read. Happily, he’d enjoyed it, or it would have been a pretty strange dinner conversation!

It’s fun that — between this and my bookbinding projects — people in my world are reading my work.

After supper, Dave and I went to a bar near home to spy on FlatmateGeoff, who was on a date. Not only do we live in the Hollywood Sitcom Flat, as Dave pointed out that night, now we’re living out sitcom scenarios. All that was missing was for one of us — for some plot-logic reason — to crawl over to his table and get under it.

The barmaid kept asking us if we wanted anything, because we were leaned so far across the bar (which reminds me that this is a cue for service), but we were actually trying to peer into the mirror there to get a look at how our buddy was doing. We left her to go on with her amazing show of alchemy, burning sugar to melt it into a glass of absinthe, crushing ice with a large pole (no blenders here!), or mashing up mint to make mojitas. I would have been fully impressed, except that Liz brought a counter-full of bar fixings to mine on Saturday and concocted similar things for us to all drink in celebration of Patrick’s birthday. She was masterful, and got us rat-arsed. We went out, and much good-badness followed.

We finally had to confess to this barmaid what we were doing, so she asked us “Oh, who is it?” She pointed at a couple snogging at a back table, “Is it them?” Suddenly we were stricken with shyness or internalised homophobia or something. She continued looking around while we said nothing. She found the only couple-esque table and subtly gestured to our mate. “Is he gay? Is that him?” Yeah, we laughed. She smiled knowingly and nodded at us. Then she went back to her work, and left us to feel like freaks for being less cool about the situation than she was.

~

Right. Time to get to work.

Briggs, Myers, Me
Friday, September 16, 2005 , 10:58 PM

I know, I know…
Wednesday, September 14, 2005 , 2:32 PM

I haven’t blogged in ages. My parents are visiting town, and I’ve been feeling very stressed about all the things I’ve taken on lately. The Time of Great Simplification lies ahead. I’m sharpening my scythe to make a clearing for new book.

In the meantime, my birthday is coming up. Can someone please, please, pleeeeeeease buy me these?

spacemonkeypants

Aberdeen weekend.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005 , 2:31 PM

I went to Aberdeen this weekend, where I bunked in a noisy, crap hotel on a bed like a trampoline with my mate Philip. Despite the sound of it, I had a great weekend.

<

p>Highlights included:

• driving through the landscape of this amazing country, seeing Perth, Arbroath, and Dunottar Castle on the way up
• watching the icky gyrations of a fat, middle-aged singer in a very talented RAWK! band
• drinks in a very stylin’ converted church called Soul
• dancing foolishly in a rubbish gay bar
• meeting Liz’s dad, whom I unilaterally declare an honorary member of the Friday Gang
• spending time with good mates. Patrick and Lizjoined Pip and I on Sunday, and they blogged about the weekend, too.

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Gutted & retarded.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005 , 10:07 AM

I just got an e-mail from a publishing house of the editor who loved Idea in Stone: He doesn’t work there anymore. And they’re not commissioning any new fiction.

So, there’s two years of correspondence and waiting down the toilet. I begin again. A few weeks ago, I sent a cool letter to the publisher he’d recommended the book to, with little tear-off responses and a stamped envelope. No reply. This is a bastard of an industry to try to have a relationship with.

~

Lately I’ve been getting into bookbinding. It’s a real craft, and I love it. For one, it’s very rewarding seeing my work — like this collection of my short stories — bound together, made readable in a form I could just hand to someone. What’s also very motivating about doing this is how much improvement I’m able to make in the process with each subsequent effort.

~

You know, about all this business of wanting to be published, and whatever other goals haven’t happened yet, I had a thought last night in bed: Yes, but if you’d already figured out how to do everything you want to be able do in life, you wouldn’t still be here.

~

Last night I was out with my friend Robert. I met him through the ‘citizen’s advocacy’ group Powerful Partnerships. Thing is, though, now we’re really just friends. Yeah, I’m helping him get moved out — slowly but surely — to a place of his own, in the community. But last night I got some perspective on the friendship we’d formed.

We were at a pub, having our usual weekly night out, over a drink and some nibbles, when a woman tottered over to us. She was young and fairly well put together, but she was steaming drunk. She blurrily introduced herself to us, then proceeded to stare at Robert, at me, at Robert, at me…

She was trying to suss out why we were together. “So you’re a befriender?” This is a term Powerful Partnerships really tries to play down. I’m not sure what the connotations are, historically, but for me, it’s an icky word, like you’re doing someone a favour. “I’m condescending to befriend you [because otherwise you would be friendless].” She asked at one point if we wanted a drink, and said she could get a receipt for me — so I could write it off, you see, because she’s a social worker, and she understands that I’m doing charity work.

Only I wasn’t. I was there with my friend.

Then it got worse: She started hitting on me, asking me for particulars about my life. I squirmed, turned red (she informed me), but she wouldn’t let go. She asked me out, I gently declined. “Why not?” Now, a ‘no’ in this situation is not something you should ever ask for more detail about.

I didn’t want to get into the whole “Because I like men” thing, because Robert and I haven’t had that conversation, and don’t need to, ’cause it’s got f*-all to do with our relationship.

Then she asked for my mobile number, letting me know that she was going to call it right away to see if it was real. So I gave it her, but I felt comfortable enough doing so, because she was so blootered she had no memory. She’d asked the same questions of us at least three times each. “Where do you stay? Where do you work? What do you do?” and answering “That’s so exciting; I’m so jealous” to whatever the answer was.

The real object lesson for me here was that here’s someone with me who’s labelled as having a learning disability, and he’s handling the situation better than either of us other two, keeping conversation going, redirecting it to comfortable topics, asking questions. Then Drunk Sharon would repeat herself, or completely lose her mental bookmark and just stare.

In short, she was acting retarded.

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w00t! w00t!
Friday, August 26, 2005 , 9:28 PM

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How interesting…
Friday, August 19, 2005 , 10:56 PM

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F*!
, 4:42 PM

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Goodbye, Patrick
Sunday, August 14, 2005 , 2:51 PM

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Happy, rainy Saturday.
Saturday, August 13, 2005 , 3:40 PM

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First week in the new flat.
, 10:19 AM

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Lunchmeat
Thursday, August 11, 2005 , 1:00 PM

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Gardner’s Crescent
Wednesday, August 10, 2005 , 5:30 PM

You know what’s fun? Company.

I just made a mullagatawny soup, desperate to eat plain grub after a month of seafood and rich restaurant meals. While I cooked, I had someone to talk with. Dave read on the sofa and we kibbitzed while I cooked. Of course, we could barely hear each other because the space between the kitchen area and the living room is a vast plain.

~

Yesterday morning, Patrick, Philip, and Liz came around to my place. All my belongings were piled in the middle of the living room at the Albion Street tenement — disturbingly multiplied since I came over from Canada with three kit bags and two boxes. The others and I filled Patrick’s and Philip’s cars, and in no time we’d moved everything over to the new flat.

I dreaded having to pack everything, and moving seemed even worse, but it went quickly, and having a lift on this end was a lot nicer than asking people to schlepp things up two flights of stairs.

Philip went to take care of his neice, and Patrick suggested a trip to Ikea. The thought had crossed my mind, but moving was as much as I’d hoped for. £300 later, and at 2AM, Patrick left my place, having assembled a giant desk with storeys of shelving to it, along with some bookcases and a unit to make a useless kitchen cupboard into a pantry. In-between Fringe shows, Liz also pitched in to help build things. These two sickos actually like doing this stuff.

I repaid them meagrely with a meal out at one of the many nearby restaurants, insisting on pizza and beer, as that’s the going rate for help moving. Throughout the day, I referred to them as my minions, but the truth is that I took a lot of direction from them.

I’m sitting in my new room now, and I have to say that I’m impressed. I always wanted to live in a hotel, and this kinda feels like that. My marbled bathroom with aworking shower, the clean lines to the walls and giant cupboards — it’s a big step up from what I’m used to. I was worrying a bit about sharing again after so much time on my own, but after seeing Geoff and Dave again, and getting to chat to each of them, I realise this is a good thing for me. This flat is so big, and we all have our own bathrooms, so we don’t really have to see much of each other if we don’t want to!

Good times.

It was a bit disorientating, walking across town to meet Dave for a Fringe show earlier this evening: I tried to take a shortcut and got a bit turned around. And I feel… unrooted, less real, like the wind could change and I would blow away. On the positive side, though, it’s like getting to move to Edinburgh all over again.

~

My last night in the Albion Road flat, someone decided to hold a “funky porn music” band practice at midnight. And the landings had a Hansel & Gretel trail of kitty litter to the other noisy neighbours’ flat. Buh-bye, neighbours.

As I lay in bed that night, I looked up at the ceiling and wondered what the ultimate fate of the building would be. Would it be demolished to make way for some modern dwelling? Or (and I preferred thinking about this possibility) might it stand until some day thousands of years from now when the sun expanded and burnt all life off the face of the earth?

I don’t know, but I have to remember to call the City Council, or else I’ll continue paying tax on it until then.

~

I’ve seen three shows in the Fringe this year, and —shocker! — I enjoyed them all!

The first was Pam Ann, a show featuring an airline stewardess comedienne. She was very funny, stringing together an brilliant sequence of well-observed moments about airline travel (complete with a few topical Air France asides), along with some clever audience interaction. I’d consider seeing this again, which is really saying something for me.

Friday night was Jeremy Lion, a children’s performer with a troubled past, who starts with good intentions, but is soon swigging actual cans of beer and shots from liquor bottles — which he passes through the audience, and damned if he isn’t drinking the real stuff. He may well die within the next five years, but in the meantime he puts on a funny show. “Funny-wrong” would be the category I’d put this in, and I like that.

Today’s show was called The Caesar Twins, and features a pair of Polish acrobat brothers who impossibly lift and twist and hold and hang and swim for an hour. The ethos of the show was hideously tacky — think Eurovision Song Contest meets a men’s freestyle mat competition. But the things they do are astounding — well beyond the human capabilities of, say, a writer who’s just come back from an extended vacation.

~

I don’t know when I’ll be able to post this. I managed to get everything unpacked and put away between last night and this morning — something I had to do before I could get on with my life — but the one last thing to sort out is an internet connection for the flat. EEEK!

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Scotland is cool.
Thursday, August 04, 2005 , 1:15 PM

This morning I dreamt of zombies — and with good reason: yesterday I felt like one. My flight from Canada was four hours late leaving, due to extreme thunderstorms and an exploding Air France plane. The last of my summer snaps shows what that looked like to me as an eyewitness at the airport:

Summer snaps.

~

My last few days were packed with activity, though it was mostly all social and fun:
Friday: A final day in the office, writing a letter over and over again until it didn’t share needless backstage details about a policy change, but focused on the client-side view of what this change would mean. It was tricky, and loads of fun. I know, I’m sick.

Talking about backstage, someone needs to give a PR lesson to the Zoom Airlines captain who thought somehow this was a prudent speech to give us when we finally lifted off on Tuesday:
“We’re finally getting going here after some severe lightning earlier, and you may have heard about the disaster with the Air France flight. We don’t have many details just yet, but hopefully there was no loss of life. It’s come to my attention that some of you have been taking it out on the flight crew that we’re leaving so late. I’d like to remind you that it’s not their fault, so perhaps you might consider sitting there quietly with a smile on your face instead.”

Nice, eh? Glad I’m not prone to fear of flying, the talking-points “disaster” and “loss of life” wouldn’t exactly be a consolation. And being told to shut up — sweet.

Okay, back to the timeline. Friday night, I hung out with my friend Parker, and we wandered around town, chatting against various backdrops (such as gang-filled parks, deserted shopping malls, and concrete waterfalls). It was nicer than it sounds.

Saturday, I met Lisa and her gang of actor and post-actor friends for brunch. She was off to Spain that afternoon, and hectored me about joining her. I don’t think I can justify it, though, as I’m moving house on Saturday, and I’ve just been away for over a month. I want to settle down for a little bit. (My new address is in the column on the right under my picture.) We went for a walk afterward, talking about everything, as we always manage to. At one point we were walking behind a man carrying a big plank of wood. He turned slightly, and we had to duck. All three of us laughed about the comedy-routine moment. I love connecting with strangers like that. It’s something that happens a lot when Lisa’s around.

Saturday afternoon, I sat in a park, falling asleep under a tree, reading, enjoying the sun from a shady vantage-point. I wandered around the town, poking through Kensington Market, but ultimately returned to my spot with a slushie, hiding from the heat.

In the evening, I went to Cath’s, where we had a barbecue on her new rooftop patio. We were joined by her brother Dave and his wife Lisa, then their friend Shawn. We soaked ourselves in the hot tub and looked out at the Toronto skyline. It was beyond being a perfect moment. I’m blessed to know so many brilliant, funny people.

I slept over at Cath’s, camped out in her meditation room, which, along with the zillion threadcount white bedding provided the most restful sleep I’d had in a long time. In the morning, we went for brunch and said our goodbyes.

Sunday evening, I went for supper at Eric’s mum’s for Eric’s birthday, which was something of an immersion in Chinese-Ontarian culture. The food was great, and Eric’s mum is so cute. Afterward, we skipped downtown for a quick drink at Woody’s, where we met Heipel and my great friend Bert Archer, whom I’d not seen in a long time. (Bert’s blog contains a great post about the Air France accident.)

The evening concluded with… Nah, can’t say.

Monday-day was spent poking around with Cosgrove, then having a spontaneous drink with him, Bert, and Margaux, who’d just returned from an EarthWatch mission to Hawaii. (Yeah, she does the neatest things.)

From there, I took the subway out to its farthest reaches to have supper at my friend Robert’s restaurant. The “Domains Group” was having a reunion meeting there — a group of us who’d all done workshops with Landmark Education, and met regularly over the course of a few years to hammer out our various life plans together. Like so many of the others I’d caught up with in Toronto, just about everyone there was going through a remarkably good time in their life, or was about to have some Big New Thing happen. It’s difficult to not be all Scots-Protestant about good news and worry about it having to be followed by something awful, but so many people I spoke to there had simplified their lives, figured things out, or reached a new level of ability. It’s everything I’d wish for for them.

The same goes for Jordan, who picked me up on Tuesday and took for a last spin around Toronto, including brunch at Flo’s Diner and an fun excusion to the Vaughan Somethingoranother Mall, a giant, incoherent gigaplex full of things no one needs, presented in seizure-inducing colours. Then we headed out to the airport. All the while, he got calls about a commercial he’d just finished shooting. The old Jordan would have been driven crazy about going $100 over budget, but now he handled with ease calls like the one from the man who rented motorcycles to the production company — including one which a stuntguy had to drop and tumble from (in his excitement to get to his local Opal car dealer). The proposed bill was for $14,000, and Jord calmly said he’d look into it. He’s also got a new boyfella, so I’m overjoyed that my wee Squeaky has lots of good stuff going on in his life.

Then there was the sturm und drang airport adventure. To pass the time, I read. I’d been tempted to breeze through the new “Harry Potter” book, but it was $41 — way too much for something I’d read once. Instead, I decided to read an e-book I had of A Farewell to Arms. I tell ya, Hemingway’s dialogue is rubbish, but everything else about the book captivated me. It didn’t matter what was going on around me, ’cause I could escape to wartime Italy. I couldn’t sleep during the flight (sI’m a bad sleeper at the best of times, and being propped upright in a chair with my legs confined to a tiny space is far from “best”), so I watched the mediocre in-flight movies.

Patrick very kindly picked me up at the airport, where I stood waiting for him in the wind, loving the chilly grey day. Because of Patrick, I didn’t have to try to get my bags into Glasgow, then through to Edinburgh, then home. I could handle the lightning arcing across the sky, but that part of the trip had me worried.

So now I’m home, settling into work, looking at a pile of bags and books on the coffee table, my suitcase on the floor, and all the everyday stuff in my flat which I now have to pack up for my move on Saturday.

EEK!

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p>The neighbours thumped music late into the night yesterday, though, so if I was looking for any reinforcement for my decision, I found it there.

<

p>

Summer!
Friday, July 29, 2005 , 4:50 AM

I took the subway over to my editor’s house this morning, wearing shorts and layered T-shirts. For the first day since I arrived here, it’s a normal summer day, not a post-apocalyptic one.

On the subway, I saw a young man walk past me carrying a thick book. I had one of my prejudices smashed when I saw that this inner-city tough was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Later on the train ride, I noticed a woman leaning across the aisle, talking to him. They didn’t look like people who would know each other, so I couldn’t help but eavedrop on their conversation. “You read it in the original Spanish?” she asked. “And now you’re reading it in English? Oh, I’m so jealous!” She said the name of one of the many unforgettable characters in the book: “Remedios”. She sighed and smiled at the boy, clutching her hands to her chest and leaning back in her seat.

Walking down the tree-lined old Toronto street Catherine lives on, I thought about this woman, and smiled myself about the fact that she felt such love for an imaginary person. And now everyone is carrying a copy of the latestHarry Potter. I like this. (Though I can’t say the same about last year’s DaVinci Code fetish.)

~

I’m into my last few days of my summer trip. Two nights ago I had supper with Kristie, whom I lived with when I first moved to Edinburgh. She’s now back in Canada with her husband Ian, and walking on air because she’s just finished training to be a schoolteacher and loves the work.

~

Last night, I went with Ross (a team member and coach at work) to a social event of The Fraternity — a gay businessmen’s group. I feared it might be horrible (gay anything, really, is a worry), but the people I met were great. We had drinks, then Ross and I went for dinner, where he told me about his post-Strategic Coach plans. I’ve no doubt he’ll be successful, and be a great help to lots of people. We also talked about my plans for my next book, and about money. The former was exciting, and the latter got my dander up — purely because of my own discomfort with the topic; his advice was sound.

But I did have a conversation in that neighbourhood the other day, as I renegotiated my terms with The Coach. I basically made a presentation based on Strategic Coach problem-solving tools, and wound up leaving the negotiations with a basket of goodies*. I thought I had a perfect job before, but it just got more perfect.

~

I’m finished attending workshops, and now I’m back to my regular writing work, but alongside Cath, who is such a great mentor within the company. But she’s more than that to me now. It’s like we’re on a spiritual buddy-system, and I love it.

I’ve decided that for the next year I’m taking myself off the market, creatively. I’m just going to indulge myself in creating whatever I want to — drawings for my walls, handmade books, a novel. Of course, I also know that this will ultimately produce better work than if I’d tried to work toward a commercial goal. Whether any of it will be saleable — well, that’s not the point. But it will be true.

I showed Cath a doodle I drew in the workshop yesterday, of a bunny strapped to a rocket, and she said, “I’d love to just take all these things you do from you and bring them to market.” My heart leapt like a cricket: I long for such a creative/business partnership.

~

The rest of my free time here until I go is really, well, party-time. The killer weather has broken, and I’m going to have an opportunity to hang out with bunches of people I really like, and be responsible for nothing but having fun.

In short, it’s summer!

*To my friends who have endured all those torturous attempts at travel plans with me, you’ll be happy to know that I will now enjoy paid vacation time. Instead of not taking time off for fear of losing income, I’ll now be faced with a strategic urgency about using up my allotted “Free Days” — a happy challenge!

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Hamster in an oven.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005 , 5:22 AM

No, I’m not going to do a Sylvia Plath, that’s just how it felt today when I left the office — like I’d just been stuck in an oven. Too, too hot here.

This weekend was fun. A nice lazy Saturday-day at Mark and Eric’s, followed by a tequila-soaked summer night that was a real hoot. It began with a backyard party at — I didn’t really follow who the hosts were. Friends of friends of friends.

In the afternoon, I had a conversation with Mark and Eric about affirmative action, and mentioned how racist I’ve found Britain, and contrasted it with my perception of Canada. This theory was blown out of the water by a drunken oik at this backyard do, who actually asked Eric “So what are you?” After a second of figuring out what exactly he was asking, Eric responded that he’s Chinese. I corrected and said that he’s Canadian.

Then the drunken, you-can-tell-I’m-a-drag-queen-even-though-I’m-dressed-like-a-man host tried to make Kaposi Sarcoma jokes with one of his guests.

Yeah, it was like that. The whole thing was distasteful — except for the wicked burn of the mescal the host kept pouring for me. That was nice.

So we drank the beer we’d brought as quickly as we could manage (this was not a party you wanted to leave beer at), and left.

From there we went to Woody’s (a pub in the gay ghetto) — “we” being Mark and Eric, and their friends Kevin and & PJ, the nice people who brought us to the not-nice people party and were increasingly mortified for having done so. I spotted a pair of guys I’d known a hundred years ago, Jay and Brent, and they joined us. More beer ensued, then we stumbled our way to Buddies, the bar/theatre where Cosgrove and I put on our play years ago. Tequila ensued, and from there the evening tumbled into a happy blur.

Yesterday involved a half-conscious trip to the DIY shops with Mark and Eric, then supper with my theatre school friend Kirsten and her family — her mum, dad, son, and her husband Malcolm. More fun, and yet another good, big meal in a restaurant.

I’m officially pudgy around the middle.

I’ve got to go to bed. I’m back in workshops this week, though with the associate coaches, who don’t visit me at the back for chats the way Dan does, so I’m just observing, really. Still, it makes for a long day. And tomorrow I have the meeting in which I renegotiate my terms with The Coach. I’m mostly confident about that.

Apologies to anyone who’s e-mailed me if I’ve not replied to you. Internet access and time for writing are difficult to find while I’m here working. And I’m into the final stretch of this trip, which involves meeting people in restaurants or for drinks every night.

Okay, must go. Night night.

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In the right place, at the right time.
Saturday, July 23, 2005 , 4:52 PM

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Chop wood, transform your obstacles.
, 2:56 AM

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Some pics and contact info.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005 , 5:49 AM

Here are some more pictures, from PEI and of my friend Lisa:
Pics

And if you didn’t know this already, I’m not in Edinburgh, so it’s no use calling or texting me. If you need to reach me while I’m here, you can use my Toronto mobile number, which is:
(416) 500-4127

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Melting
Monday, July 18, 2005 , 11:56 PM

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An island afloat in notes.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005 , 5:57 PM

I’m sitting in the Charlottetown Public Library. There’s something very square, Seventies, and governmental about the buildings that form this block, which also includes the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Doesn’t that name say it all?

The library hasn’t changed too much, though the old encyclopaedia section has been replaced with a bank of computers.

A woman in the children’s library upstairs just finished reading a story in a high, very energetic voice, sounding like a puppet on a mix of speed and helium.

I’m here to work today. The last two days I’ve worked from home, but, just like my place in Edinburgh, my folks’ house is distracting — too much to eat, constant high-speed internet connection, and so on. Being in a place with other people doing things, even if it’s — like now — two women reading a story loudly in squeaky Island accents, is helpful. It gives that ADHD monkey in my head something to pay attention to so I can focus on my work.

~

Last night, I went to The Guild, a newly-renovated local theatre/arts space, with my mum. A young temp she works with was performing in a show called “Celtic Ladies”. They were very good — singing, step-dancing, and playing a variety of instruments. There’s a fascination in Maritime Canada with things Scottish, so some of the show’s material made me feel homesick. It’s hard to articulate, but there’s a slight difference to the work here, something original that’s been added by the distance and time between this work and its source.

Mom said something the other night as we sat on the couch at the end of the day (just before she fell asleep on her crossword, book, or in front of the telly, as she always does) about how in touch with the arts scene I am here, that it’s the one part of the Island I still seem strongly connected to. I pointed out that a good part of that is due to her. Saturday night we went to “Late Night at the Mack”, a cabaret put on by members of the Charlottetown Festival company (man, the talent!), and Sunday we went to The Kirk of St James to see an American choral and handbell choir. Music is a constant feature of my mum’s life, with church choir, barbershop chorus, and a barbershop quartet she belongs to.

Dad? It’s harder to say what he does. Mom keeps joking with him about his Parkinson’s medication making him obsessive — about playing FreeCell, mowing the lawn, doing jobs around the house. Only the FreeCell is new. I’m thrilled I don’t have to mow that damned lawn anymore! Dad’s always been handy around the house, so if I were to characterise what he does now, I’d say “He’s retired.” I pointed out to Mom that she’s got her share of obsessions, too, and no pills to blame them on.

That’s it, really. Nothing much going on. It’s grey and drizzly here, and I’m loving it, knowing how killingly hot it’s going to be in Toronto. I head there on Saturday.

Andrew (my nephew) has been down the past few days. I find myself connecting better with him now than ever before. At 17, he’s a little person. I’m better with adults than children. My brother and sister-in-law will be coming down sometime this evening. Then, tomorrow, my Uncle Garfield and his wife. I’ve not seen Garf in about a decade.

I should end this and get to work. That’s the update — just a grocery list of activities, but sometimes life’s like that. Thanks for reading.

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I can do anything.
Monday, July 11, 2005 , 2:42 PM

Two days ago, my mum was talking with someone at Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “L” Division, where she works. The woman was in a lather because she was organising a training day for officers who were training as negotiators, and one of the actors they’d lined up to pretend to be someone causing a hostage/crisis situation had called to cancel. Someone in the show he’s in at The Charlottetown Festival lost her voice, so he’d been called into emergency cast rehearsals so the woman’s understudy could prepare for the evening’s performance (which Mom and I had tickets for)

Mom said, “Oh, my son’s an actor.”

Mom is proud of me. I appreciate that. It’s a good thing.

Usually.

Oh, you’ve got to call him,” said the woman. Mom quickly corrected, saying that, well, Alistair isn’t acting anymore, he’s a writer. But she phoned anyway. She figured I’d say no.

On the other end of the phone, I didn’t realise that saying no was an option. Of course it always is, but when there’s a situation where I can do something that’s needed, it’s difficult for me not to.

So I spent the day in front of a “throw-phone” — a black plastic telephone handset inside an indestructible black plastic box — trying to whip myself into hysterics. In the morning, I was a man who’d sprung his wife from the mental ward and his two premature babies from the hospital so they could start their crackheaded family off right. Or else. In the afternoon, I was a man who’d just discovered his wife in bed with his best friend, and was planning to kill her and himself.

This is half of why I don’t act anymore: Who would want to be either of these people? I don’t! I like being me!

I got a free lunch, fifty bucks, and met some nice RCMP folk who do really, really interesting work.

There was an actress there, an Island woman namedCynthia Dunsford, who, judging from what my mum’s said, and the number of times she’s been mentioned in things or popped up on the radio since I first heard her name, is a central figure in the creative community here. We got on like a house on fire, and I bet that if I spent more than fifteen minutes living on the island we’d end up creating something together.

I was too tired to stay awake when Mom took me home, and still full from lunch, so I just slept till it was time to go out for the evening. Mom and I went to see Canada Rocks!, a show in the Charlottetown Festival this summer. There wasn’t much story there, but, man, there was a truckload of talent on that stage, so much energy, it was great to see. And they had excellent material to work with: Canadians are good with the music.

My friend Julain is in the show, and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Wow. Wow… Wow. All I could think was that she sounded like a lion roaring on a plain — so sure, so powerful, so absolute. Her voice makes me believe in God. Someone able to do that, to create that, to have all that craft and talent. Wow. There’s something so right about seeing someone doing what they’re so obviously meant to do.

There were a couple of people in that show, as there usually are around the theatre, who remind me of something important: They’ve got the flame turned up higher. It’s so easy to just get by, but life can be more when you let out what’s in you. While, yes, I like not having to be crazy for a living, there’s something that really appeals to me about the creative life.

There’s a lot of stuff I can do. I want to turn that flame up.

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Suppertime with the ‘rents.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005 , 9:02 PM

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Forking Union Station!
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 , 3:21 AM

I flew to Canada today. Patrick was sweet and took time away from work and got up early to take me to Glasgow airport.

I had battery power galore, so I watched a movie on my Pocket PC (some grim Scottish thing, as opposed to the Hollywood pap they were showing on-screen), then, having just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, I looked through the e-books I had on a storage card to see what else I could read.

FORK.

A few weeks ago, my friend Kirsten sent me a backup of the book she’s working on, her second set of travel memoirs. She sent me the file because everyone else who was keeping a copy for her was in the same thunderstorm- and tornado-filled part of Ontario she lives in.

I was a bad boy and I converted it to an e-book, ’cause I wanted to read it. I opened it this afternoon, and wasriveted. Is it a good book? I couldn’t tell you. I was too transfixed by getting to read a book about friends of mine. And one section of it is about a trip I took with her and her husband. It was even better than those books they tried to sell on television when I was a kid, with the child’s name stuck into the text at regular intervals.

It was cool to read about Kis’s other trips, which was like getting to hang out with her and her husband Malc by proxy. Great, too, that someone captured on the page the experiences we shared on that cycling trip across Arizona.

Strange, too, to have someone reanimate in text a crush — or whatever you call a one-way love — for someone. Just nights ago I had a dream about my best friend from university, in which I was filled again with that emotion I had for him, like being helplessly stoned when needing to operate heavy machinery. In both these cases, my normal, now-self would think about these fellas and feel nothing and not understand the compulsion. You’d think that was that then, but I find it funny that the dream and this fact-story could make me go “Oh yeah…”

~

It’s sweltering here. Cosgrove wasn’t sure which day I was arriving (I’m sure that had to do with my not being clear last time we talked online about it), so I waited at Union Station for a long time this afternoon. I didn’t mind, ’cause I had FORK to read, but I must admit that I started wondering if I needed to come up with a Plan B. But no, Cos appeared in post-work garb, with a hug, and we were right back in our in-person bestfriendship (it’s always there in some form, usually online chats about whatever’s going on).

Did I mention it’s sweltering? I’m sitting in the room in Mark and Eric’s place that used to be “the office”. Mark is surfing, looking at what he calls “house porn”, since they’re looking to sell their place soon and make a move. Eric’s down the hallway, and we can’t hear anything he’s saying because the double fan in the window here is acting as a perfect white noise generator.

Union Station will actually be familiar to any of my friends from Scotland who’ve been to the cinema: there’s an advert that plays, showing this group of (I guess they’re supposed to be) sexy young people running through a train station, trying to get to Prague. Once bundled on a train, the conductor passes through calling out “Barcelona, Barcelona”, and the people on-board look confused, then raise their glasses of [the product that I won’t endorse further here; bad enough to pay six quid for a movie, only to be forced to watch the ad in the first place] to toast Barcelona. Of course, getting to eitherPrague or Barcelona from a train station on Toronto’s Front Street would be quite a trick.

~

Off to drink some water and melt in front of the telly with Cosgrove for a bit.

Tomorrow, a day with my editor!

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A moving story.
Thursday, June 23, 2005 , 1:21 PM

We got the flat!

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Last Song of the Night Tram.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005 , 6:10 PM

I Google well.

Search for “Hamish MacDonald”, and I’m there. In fact, that’s how my friend Kirsten Koza found me, years after we’d drifted out of touch with each other.

Oh, sure, judging from the Google results you’d get the impression that I was a fine artist, that I was the otherHamish MacDonald who’s also a writer in Scotland, and you might also wonder why I hadn’t told you about my successful career as an Australian paralympics competitor. (I also didn’t write Mussolini and Italian Fascism, nor am I a business consultant in Toyko.)

BUT…

When you search for the book Last Song of the Night Tram, by Robert Douglas, I now show up in the results because I mentioned it in this blog, and their no-longer secret-searching methods picked up the words.

SO… I feel responsible for finishing what I started to say about it that day.

Let me put it this way: On Saturday, after viewing the flat and hanging out with Dave and Geoff for a few hours, I went to the bar at the Cameo cinema, plopped myself in a chair in a corner, and read. Geoff joined me a while later, and we sat there, reading together. It was such a nice, calm, civil thing to do. It was slow time, something we’re supposed to be good at in Europe, but I’m not sure if that really applies to the UK.

As I reached the end of the book, I couldn’t stop crying. An era in the author’s recounted life was drawing to a close, but by that point it felt so familiar, so precious, that I was heartbroken. He couldn’t get those childhood days back, because events closed a door and forced him to move on. I couldn’t go back, because those days had never been mine. And yet, if I’d ever felt before that somehow that era belonged to me, the feeling was redoubled by poring over the beautiful, simple vignettes of daily tenement life in postwar Glasgow.

Maybe it won’t win any awards because of this simplicity. But cleverness can be empty, self-serving. The kind of love with which the author describes these days, especially in the way he portrays his mother — that’s worth something, something more than a plot-twist or any other oblique literary trick. He didn’t try to make his mother into a saint, but by God you love her by the end of the book. That’s an awfully nice gift to her memory.

I wish I could do the same for my parents, both of whom deserve it.

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Corn and tartan.
Monday, June 20, 2005 , 11:38 PM

The scariest thing about moving: I can’t justify taking my broken down old microwave, ’cause only the 1, 2, 3, 4, “Start”, and “Clear” buttons work. Popcorn cooks perfectly at 4:33. There’s a microwave built-in at the new flat (again, this is all assuming we get it), and I won’t know how to cook popcorn in it!

~

I wrote my bro’ about this, ’cause I’m very happy to have found it: I’ve discovered “The Tartan Podcast”, a collection of modern Scottish music compiled into a show that’s podcast three times a week by a friendly host with the nicest Glaswegian accent. (I’ve realised that this is the accent that I love; it is to my ears what caramel is on my tongue. I wonder if this is some sort of genetic memory, or just an “Old Country” fetish.)

I’m happy for the influx of fresh songs I happen to enjoy, because I usually have a hard time finding new music. I also like the idea that I’m listening to something local, and that the featured artists want me to download it. It’s “podsafe”, as the host calls it. (Or Windows Mobile Device safe, if, like me, you happen to belong to the other religion by virtue of the objects you use.)

Here’s the URL:
tartanpodcast.co.uk

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The spirit of 45 Albion Road.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005 , 11:11 PM

Geoff and I looked at flats today. One was very nicely done-up, a little north of Queen Street on — I think it was Hanover (or whatever it’s called up there). It was nice, but something — hard to say what — was missing for me. It was a bit too white, too light pine, too mirrory. I couldn’t picture myself sitting down comfortably in it, not without keeping my hands firmly knit together on my lap while sitting up very straight.

The second one was directly across from St Giles’ Cathedral — stunning spot but, oh… Every foot of wall space was covered in posters. The walls oozed the smell of cigarettes and pot. The beds were tumbled and the floors lined with pants. The hob was baked in boiled-over pastasomething. The pull-chain in the toilet was secured with two bulldog clips, and the shower was like a plastic telephone booth. Yup: students.

The best place — someplace Geoff, Dave, and I saw at the weekend — may be ours after all. The landlord seems amenable to accommodating our various lease agreements, so we may get it for the date we wanted.

This place is huge. Three of us could live there and barely get to know each other better. The kitchen reminded me of the cafe at The Strategic Coach. It’s the kind of gorgeous space that sitcom characters live in (even though they’re unemployed), wearing their nice clothes and sporting perfect haircuts. Dave said that whenever he walked past the window (he’s been living on the ground floor of this building), the model-like tenants always seemed to be drinking wine and enjoying themselves. It’s that kind of place.

Walking through it, realising I could afford to live there, made me wonder what that would do to my sense of “How Hamish’s life is going”. Walking around the flat, trying to keep it all in my head (A bathroom each?), I felt my spirits lift: “I deserve this,” I thought.

Sure, there’s a certain romance to the “writer’s garret”, though to be fair, my wee granny flat is not that. But the tenement I live in has gone to the dogs in the past year, with noise seeping through the walls at all hours, and the hallways becoming a tip for bin-bags full of smelly remnants leaking onto the concrete, fag-ends flicked for someone else (WHO?!) to pick up, bus tickets crumpled and dropped, and now cotton ear-buds. Blyeech!

I realise now that Mrs Simpson, that little elderly lady, twisted like an old tree hit several times by lightning-strokes, was the living heart of this building, the last of the original tenants. She’s gone, moved away, and so has something else about the place. It’s been a good home these past years, but it’s time to go.

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Scottish spring.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005 , 8:21 PM

While my employer-friends were here, and right up until yesterday, the sky was grey and the air was tinged with cold that felt like it had come up off the sea. Today, though, everything’s different.

I took a dozen little things out of the pockets of my winter jacket this morning and left the house for the first time without my heavy coat. “But what if the weather changes?” my internalised mother asked. I didn’t care. I’d decided it was spring, dammit, and set off into town.

I worked at the library until suppertime, then went to the Forest Cafe, where I had beans on toast for a pound-sixty (can’t beat that), and checked my e-mail on their wireless connection. I’d received a rush-job from The Coach, so I dropped what I was working on and had fun writing a one-page ad from scratch while trying not to goggle at a handsome young French staff-member.

I walked home along the Regent Road, looking out at the big green isoscoles triangle that is Arthur’s Seat. The air was more than just mild, it was almost… sweet. It felt like the dozen summers of childhood. Everything was easy and uncomplicated. I stopped in the park, sat on a bench, and started reading Night Song of the Last Tram: A Glasgow Childhood, by Robert Douglas. It was the perfect thing to read, casting me back to wartime Glasgow, which holds a special place in my imagination for no reason I can describe.

I left the park, even though there was still plenty of light — for the rest of the summer it’ll stay light until quite late — and went to the Regent Pub. I ordered a pint of heavy and read some more of my book.

After that, I walked down the Easter Road, which is lined by the black points of church spires and tenements prickling all the way down to the Firth of Forth. The sun was lowering, giving off a honey light that painted everything in sentimental watercolours. I stopped into the ScotMid to pick up some groceries, where a man with a white brush-cut and white stubble staggered and argued around a tall, thin black security guard. One was a foreigner yet politely doing his piece, while the other was a local disturbing the order of things. The exchange had something to do with a bottle he wanted or hadn’t paid for.

“This is a very difficult time in my life,” said the drunk to those of us in the queue. “I suffer from alcoholism, so I need this bottle of cider, or…” But he couldn’t tell us what would happen if he didn’t get it. I bought my celery, potatoes, butter, and porridge, and left the scene to work itself out.

On the way home, I passed talking mothers with their children in tow, people going into the chippy, couples walking, friends drinking behind the window of a pub. The clothes were modern, some of the buildings and all of the cars updated, but nothing substantial seemed any different to the life I’d just been reading about in the book.

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The perils of jaywalking.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005 , 11:59 PM

In the past two weeks, I’ve seen two people get hit by cars. The first time it was a guy, and this weekend it was a young woman. In both cases, the ‘victim’ quite willingly ran out into traffic with their friends, drunk and laughing, until they got clipped by a car (which drove off).

The lad’s friend went berserk and started punching dents in the side panel of the car that dared to be there when his mate jumped in front of it. The boy who was struck seemed to be okay — saved by the grace of drunken limpness. The girl didn’t do so well: her friends stood around, clutching themselves, fingers to lips, until an ambulance came and took her away.

I don’t know why I mention this. It’s just odd to witness this twice in such close succession. Funny how one minute you can be having fun, then the next something dreadfully serious can happen. Of course, the likelihood of this increases exponentially when you’re pissed out of your head.

Myself, I had a good weekend with my friends. Friday was supper with the gang, then (many) drinks at Medina, where we sat in one of their little underground cubbies having a chat that culminated in us inventing likely futures for each other. Saturday was “Burly” at The Arches — fun because I was with my mates, but the music was rubbish again, and the crowd are not my people. I’m not muscley, hairy, tattooed, leather-bound, or bald, nor am I attracted to that type. This means I can just relax and have agenda-less fun for its own sake — or I would do, except for the rubbish music, noise, heat, etc. I think I’m going to strike this event off my calendar.

~

I was supposed to have a second date with someone on Thursday. His excuse for cancelling (too busy right now with things) actually didn’t sound like an excuse, because I feel the same way. This would be a bad time to start anything, since I’m off to Canada soon for a month. I’m flipping between indifference about this and trying to feel indifferent about it. More of the former, though, ’cause I haven’t got a lot of mental space for things at the moment. My biggest concern is being useful to my advocacy partner before I go, though I’ve said that I’m happy to keep being his advocate when I get back.

I’m not producing anything creative outside of work, which also feels odd. Instead, I’ve been reading a lot. Tonight I finished Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. That was slow going. Lots of flashbacks, and the whole thing felt like going through a family genealogy with someone — of their family, not yours. Some beautiful images, and lots of apposite “Scots going to Canada” material, though, which is what kept me with it.

<

p>I like stories that:

• follow one character.
• unfold along a straight timeline.
• have light and serious moments — not all just silly setups or endless dour consequences. The latter sort of reading just feels like spending my spare time being punished. Forgive me for being relatively well-adjusted and not having anything in common with junkies, members of abusive families, people who consistently make bad relationship choices, and any combination thereof — even though these books seem to be the type that win awards.
• are held together by a unifying sequence of events (not like a scrapbook of random images).

I’m finally giving myself permission: It’s okay to like this kind of story, and it’s okay to write this kind of story.

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Rice erroneous.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005 , 4:22 PM

Despite my strict instructions to the contrary, bothCosgrove and Patrick wrote me to tell me how to cook rice — namely, “just boil it”.

I’m now freed from the extra packaging and processedness of boil-in-the-bag rice! Hazzah!

I’m having the same thing tonight as I did last night, because it was so good:
— rice
— tahini
— lemon juice
— shredded carrot
— chopped onion
— shoyu

But tonight I’ve added parsley to it, too.

~

My mum e-mailed me today to tell me that my cousin Joey died last night. He had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis — an as-yet irreversible and fatal disease that destroys nerve cells. Joey was married and had three young children, which makes this especially difficult.

My most vivid memory of him is from childhood, when my family went to Cape Breton to visit my dad’s brother Max and his family. Joey is one of Max’s four children, my cousins.

On this particular visit, one of Joey’s sisters was doing something with a Barbie doll that annoyed him, so he grabbed it from her and ran toward the house. A trail of us kids followed him, not knowing what he was up to. Inside, he opened one of the lids of the coal-burning stove, like an black iron pancake with a handle, and threw Barbie in. Her long blonde hair shrivelled, blackened, and shrank while she kept smiling. Then her body went into contortions in the heat. She hula danced to death.

The little cousin whose doll it was cried, and so did I — from laughter. I knew it was awful and cruel, but it was the funniest thing I’d seen in my life.

I don’t like this business of motor-neuron diseases in my family. At the moment, though, my thoughts are more taken up with Joey’s family and Max’s family.

<

p>Goodbye, Joey.

<

p>

Advocacy, witches, and breadsticks — oh my!
Monday, May 30, 2005 , 7:27 PM

I’m just home from being out, and am eating breadsticks and hummus. This was the last tub of hummus and it didn’t have the packaging with the barcode on it, so the nice lady at the grocery store rang it through as a 20p newspaper for me. Tasty paper.

I was out this evening with Ros from Powerful Partnerships to meet someone to see if I might be suitable as a “citizens’ advocacy” partner for him. We met with this young man and his key-worker at the home where he stays. Normally Ros would call him back in a few days to get his thoughts on having me as his advocate, and he would say yes or no. Well, I’m dead chuffed: he said a determined “Yes” before we’d even left. I won’t be saying much more about it here, out of respect for his privacy. Suffice it to say that I really liked this guy, and am keen to be friends with him. Hopefully I can be useful, too.

The idea of citizens’ advocacy, as it’s been explained to me, is to be there as a friend to people whose daily social world is made up largely of people who are paid to deal with them, who are answerable to organisations, boards, and social work plans. Symptomatic descriptions describe a reality that it’s naive to ignore, but they also create a prison of limited expectations. And the urge to protect more vulnerable members of society is a good one, but not when it precludes an individual’s right to learn and grow by taking good risks. An advocate is ultimately answerable to no one but their partner, and is there just to help give voice to someone’s wants in life.

I was nervous about this situation because there’s so much I don’t know. I’m sure the situation will have complexities to it that I don’t yet see. But now that I’ve met an actual person, all I feel is that I’ve made a new friend. I’m someone who gets excited about potential, and here’s someone who’s specifically asked for help in making his ideas real. It’s compelling. I was just expected to be a “short-term” advocate here, but I don’t feel the need for that limiter on things now.

~

This weekend, Dan and Babs, the owners and co-founders of The Strategic Coach — the company I write for — came to visit me. They regularly travel to London, but this time took a detour up here to see me. Quite an honour, coming from two people whose presence is in such demand.

I was nervous: I’d had friends visit before, but they were all family or my peers. This couple is ludicrously successful — what would a couple of millionaires want to do in Edinburgh? I’ve got no experience of this!

From the moment they stepped off the train and I saw them, I knew my worries were unfounded. The three days we spent together were a joy: these people are my good friends. I’d always taken the tack of treating them as such, rather than being weird or obsequious with them because they don’t require that of their team (or particularly like it in people), but hanging out together, walking through the Old Town, talking about everything under the sun, was a nice, relaxed experience I’d not had with them before. I didn’t have to share them.

In the past, we’ve had differences of opinion on things, particularly when it comes to politics. But — maybe because of the Zen thinking I’ve been doing — I found I had no position I needed to defend. The talk was just talk, and there was nothing to refute or contest, just ideas to play with — for that’s all talk is.

They treated me royally, too, which I appreciated. I finally got to go to places I’d only looked at from the outside, like the Balmoral Hotel and The Witcheryrestaurant. We also went to Plaisir du Chocolat, which I’d never been into, since I think of myself as someone who doesn’t like chocolate. But I drank a cup of oily, rich, luscious hot chocolate, and I tasted a sweet curried pea soup Dan and Babs both ordered, and — well, no, that didn’t hook me. What did was the environment, which is a lush Art Nouveau tearoom that Proust would have felt at home in. I admit it: I’m a writer who enjoys the trappings and romances of his profession, so I’ll definitely be going back there.

~

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m still sleepy from being awake most of the night two nights ago: I never drink coffee, but having a cup after supper at a fancy restaurant seemed like the thing to do. Bad idea. I’m not used to the stuff. I’ll grab a book shortly and head to bed.

Night night.

AARGH! Rice!
Thursday, May 26, 2005 , 4:47 PM

The ScotMid had no boil-in-the-bag rice, so I had to buy real-rice. I’m about to sit down to my tea. Fingers crossed, but it looks a bit undercooked (the choice seemed to be between that, burnt, or soupy).

And yet…

I don’t want anyone to try to tell me how to make rice, just as I don’t want anyone to show me how to play pool, or how to juggle.

Low-pressure system.
, 3:28 PM

At the beginning of the week, my two best mates, both here and abroad, presented me with some heaviness that’s going on in their lives. There was nothing I could do for either of them, and I felt a bit sucked in. And now here’s me with that last post, going back, exhuming old stuff I thought wasn’t an issue anymore.

The other night I was walking home, and the air was cold and damp, like it had come off the sea — the Firth of Forth, which I could see if I followed the line of Easter Road all the way forward. The next day, it was sunny and hot. It’s so changeable, inconstant right now.

Maybe there’s something planetary or weather-wise going on that’s affecting us. It really does feel that random and external.

Cosgrove just said something cool to me on MSN about sharing the load of personal crap with friends: “All you want sometimes is to have someone listen and really understand, or just empathize and not try to tell you ‘It’s nothing’ but get that it (what you’re feeling) is somethingeven if it (what’s going on) is empirically nothing.”

I like that.

Lots of questions.
, 1:37 PM

Why is “So how’s your love-life?” an open topic for conversation? I don’t have a love-life, I just shag people.

Next question.

~

I haven’t been blogging, I know. I’ve been having distant thoughts like thunder on the horizon, but they won’t come in. There’s no rain.

I think I’m pregnant: There’s a new book stirring in my belly. I know nothing about it yet, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a difficult delivery — not the process, which I’m well familiar and comfortable with, but the subject matter and the depth of it. Each book digs a little deeper into my backyard, and with this being the fourth one, some stuff is going to get uncovered.

There are some themes going around my head lately.

One of them is the idea of passion versus balance. Star Wars of all things made me aware that I’d been thinking about this. I’ve been doing lots of thinking and work about centering, disidentifying from the stories and thoughts blowing through my life, and getting to a really nice, still place. The challenge with this, though, is that you can do that to a point where you’re unmoved byanything. There’s a level of disconnection that’s dangerous.

I suppose awareness practice doesn’t ask for disconnection at all, but rather full participation, complete presence. Still, there’s a bliss in being free from the trashiness of daily dramas that’s seductive.

But art is driven by passion. You have to be out there in the mud and grass, rolling on the concrete, to have any ideas or even to be bothered creating something. Is all art reaction?

Ugh. This feels a bit like when I left acting, ’cause I was sick of having to become these troubled people for a living. If my life gets too settled and comfortable, though, I’ll have nothing to say, no experiences to reflect or report on. I feel like this next book isn’t really going to happen until I let go, indulge my passion, and get involved in… things. I just don’t know what those things are at the moment.

This doesn’t mean I subscribed to the f*ed up artist school of thought. Personal torment and creative ability are not the same thing. It’s boring to watch people indulge themselves or try to sanctify their victimhood. Drama, as I’ve said elsewhere, is for people avoiding the responsibility of creating something better.

~

A few nights ago, a new friend invited me out to theEdinburgh Rush festival. It was exactly what I needed, to get out of the house and go to an arts event. I had one particularly good talk with a singer/songwriter named Chris Brown. Blethering about the creative process — telling someone about how I write a book, hearing how he creates a song — got me excited about the possibilities of it at a time when I’ve just been sliding, hibernating, composting. Even better was that when he got up to sing he was really good!

~

I’ve been reading some delicious writing. The other night I read a story by Salman Rushdie from a great fundraising anthology called Telling Tales. It was such an imaginative treat, and I received it like an invitation: Here was exactly the kind of story I like to write, imaginative without apology, descriptive and evocative — realising all the possibilities of magical realism.

~

Another theme that keeps coming up is child abuse. Yeah, no fun. Last night I was reading an article about the prominent and much-admired Internet lawyer Larry Lessig’s taking on a sexual abuse case against the boy-choir school he went to. In doing so, he had to confront the fact that he’d been abused there, too.

I was reading this while waiting for Geoff, as we were going to see a movie called Mysterious Skin, which was about… sexual abuse.

This wasn’t part of my experience at all, thank God. At the same time, though, I think back to my childhood, and it feels like the crime was there without a culprit. I was a very young child when I became aware that I was different, and I knew somehow that a lot of people would hate me for that difference, even though I have no memory of the topic ever being discussed around me. My parents were certainly as liberal as was possible: Dad was a parole officer, standing up for people that general society had no use for.

But there was something bad about me, and my thoughts and feelings were a constant stream of wrongs I had to hide. I’ve had very few direct experiences of that external hatred, but man did I do well at taking the job on myself as a boy. I had an ideal childhood, but I always felt a bit intense, a bit preoccupied, a bit scared of being found out, and a bit unhappy because of it. Big surprise that I was suicidal several years later, that I’ve lost someone to this same whirlpool of self-hatred, and that my “community” is so hell-bent on self-destruction.

I get so bored of “gay this” and “gay that” when I don’t believe there is such a thing as “gay”. And yet, when I read and see these things, it feels familiar, and it hurts. I’ve tried hard so far to produce work that’s not about that. There are so many other stories, and what effect the past has is completely up to each of us. But maybe I’m fooling myself if I think I can ignore this theme in my work and my life.

I feel like I should cut this whole entry. Blyeech — more therapeutic barf on the Internet. But what’s the instinct to censor, except more apology and embarrassment about my experience.

I’m going to have to write a bunch of happy, clever, funny posts in succession to bump this one off the front page.

Room for one.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005 , 6:24 PM

My friend Sheila came over last night to finish up the last of the ‘zine printing. I’m embarrassed to have people over, because I know that I’m such a bachelor. For instance, she pointed out as we were talking that I was ‘dusting’ the shelf under the coffee table with my sock. Oops.

I do, however, like to cook. Right now, I’ve got a mullagatawny soup on the boil that I think is going to be damned good. I just can’t cook when someone’s watching. I get all self-conscious in my tiny kitchen and drop things. Same thing with typing: I can’t do it when someone’s watching, and my fignres strat splipnig…

Bit strange in someone who used to act and sing in front of crowds of people.

~

My scented geranium, which Patrick and Anita gave me, has sprouted tiny flowers. I think it’s a faint, obsequious little show in a vain attempt to keep me from killing it. Patrick showed me this trick with plants called “watering”, and I think it likes it. I don’t want it to get too comfortable, though. Bachelors aren’t big on commitment, even to the insentient.

In bloom.
Friday, May 06, 2005 , 1:11 PM

The cherry blossoms are out in Edinburgh. They sworl around my feet, or fall from trees like I’m in a queer ticker-tape parade. They celebrate nothing at all, except being.

~

Last Saturday was Beltane. I went up Calton Hill at night with my good friends, got rat-arse drunk on tequila and tonic, and watched the procession of painted-up nakedy people and fire take us into the new season.

I also saw Casablanca. I’d never seen it before. Growing up, I never liked black and white movies because they were always full of talking and mush. I guess I like that now. In fact, that’s what I appreciated most: The dialogue. It was like a hold-over from theatre. Everything a character says is a clever quip, and moves the plot forward. There’s something to be said for that, for art to be heightened, not just a copy of life but an improvement on it.

~

<

p>It occurred to me last night that I’ve now officially been in Edinburgh four years.

Not the same.
Thursday, April 28, 2005 , 10:18 PM

I went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this evening with my friends. As my brother said this evening when we talked on Skype, they were the first books I read that made me laugh out loud. I laughed until I cried at the bit where the whale falls to earth and blows up in a rain of meat. I’m sure that in some way inspired the exploding panda at the beginning of The Willies.

But it’s not the same now. When I tried to read the first book a few years ago, the sense of humour just didn’t gibe with me at all. Likewise, the movie seemed to be rushing to stick in parts of the book that it wanted to allude to (allusion, there you go — defined that word for my beloved nephew a few days back). But there was something hollow about it for me. I don’t think it was just a UK/US misunderstanding.

Strangely, though, the bits I skimmed over as a kid, or didn’t even notice — that developed the relationship between Arthur and Trillian — were the most interesting to me now. Back then, I loved all the science fictiony made-up bits, and as a magical realist, I’m still in love with imaginative writing. But what compelled me most about the movie was the relationship between those two, those feelings, those strings of hormones and neuropeptides and Symposium-esque Platonic otherhalfnesses. (I think I’m also in the dreaded grip of Spring Fever.)

Although…

There was one scene in which [SPOILER, like you haven’t read the book] Arthur is travelling over the new Earth with Slartibartfast (played by Bill Nighy, whom I love in everything I’ve seen him in), with great symphonic chords underneath, and I felt that sense of wonder I did back then. Walking home tonight, the song “Heaven and Hell”, the theme to the Carl Sagan 1980 PBS series “Cosmos”, played on my MP3 player. (Okay, which is my phone, but nevermind the details.) Its cheesy, Vangelis-y chords reminded me of the time I spent with my best friend Karl, watching that show, wondering at the universe we lived in. The world we pretended about with those ideas was infinite, bound in only by our imaginations.

Karl had Muscular Dystrophy. Because of this, we spent nearly every day together, drawing cartoons in his parents’ basement, reading books, or pretending about other worlds and other possibilities. Brainy, inventive stuff was the only option on the table. Karl always was the smarter of the two of us.

Undoubtedly, he died long ago. People with his form of MD rarely see the age of 20. I regret that his family never told me about it, and I’ve been unable to find any record of it on the web. Of course, it wouldn’t make any difference. He’s now part of that vastness that we wondered about — as I am, only I’m still in that illusory “world of opposites” part of it, where through my ego I can imagine myself as somehow separate from it, an individual within it.

When, in the movie, I heard that banjoey twang of theHitchhiker’s Guide theme, I was immediately rewound to those days, to that sense of how funny it all was then, and how inviting that limitless world of madeupness was. I’m very happy that my life’s work is still based on those principles.

Further to that, today I received a rejection letter from the publisher who’a been sitting on my book. As rejections go, it was as good as they come: He loves the book, but budgetary constraints mean they’re only doing non-fiction this year. So he recommended me to another, bigger publisher, who are expecting the manuscript. And if nothing happens with them, he’s invited me to go back to him with it. Wow.

I walked to the movie this evening, after getting this letter, with the sun shining in my eyes. I felt like the lord of my domain. Yes, I’ve been practicing this Zen notion of detachment, of not getting emotionally hooked by things. But this stirred the embers in me up to a flame. I don’t know where the balance is: On the one hand, I believe it’s good to know this detachment, to just be the doing of things, not crave them with the ego, or need them to fulfill anything that rightly I can only supply myself with. But on the other hand, I deeply believe that I’m here to learn how to manifest ideas, how to make the imagined real. This show of support from a professional in the publishing business was a reminder to be a little less humble, to get off my arse and put my work out there so I might know some success for it, so I can become a bigger creator.

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Ribbet, ribbet… BANG!
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 , 4:22 PM

My buddy Heipel just pointed this news item out to me, about frogs in Hamburg that are blowing up.

Okay, I had it as seagulls, but I can see how the great forces would have decided that frogs were more easily splodable.

~

I had a dream a few mornings ago that it was the last day of school before summer holiday, only I didn’t have to go back in the fall. That was it, I was finished. No more school ever.

Then I woke up, and found that I really didn’t have to go to school ever again. Life is one big, long summer break. Except, as Patrick pointed out to me, we have bank accounts.

P.S. I have an extra ticket for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for tomorrow at 5:20, if anyone wants to go.

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What next… disco?
Tuesday, April 26, 2005 , 9:54 AM

As I sent out e-mails yesterday, making plans with my friends, I had a strange sense of deja vu:

On Thursday we’re going to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. (By the way, gang, I’ve picked up the tickets. We’re good to go.) Yesterday’s e-mails were about my reserving tickets for the final Star Wars movie. And Patrick was trying to sort out a time for me to catch up on the Doctor Who episodes I’d missed that he’d TiVO-ed.

What am I, eleven again?

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Writing in restaurants.
Sunday, April 24, 2005 , 1:58 PM

Yesterday I spent several hours writing the article on Belarus. It was a toughie, because the subject is so big and sprawling, and I wasn’t clear what my angle on it was. Yes, I actually experienced writer’s block at work this week over it.

Of course, there’s no such thing as writer’s block; it’s always a matter of fixating on outcome, or not asking enough questions about the task at hand. With this piece, it was time to just dive in and get the thing written — to tell the story, give some information, and get an idea across.

So yesterday I begged out of an invitation to what sounded like a lovely picnic and spent my time in The Elephant House, then when that got too smoky, in Favorit, writing away. It’s my perfect Saturday, really, though I’m not used to doing work-work at the weekend. But there’s so little difference between work and play in this regard.

On the way home, I detoured into The Waverley Bar because I figured Liz was working. Indeed she was, so we chatted for a bit until the pub filled up a bit.

The challenge with epiphanies is that the newness wears off, and they get incorporated into daily life. Such is the case with my latest round of insights: it’s tough to get the exhilaration I had a few weeks ago. Happily, though, those ways of thinking have become habit. One way this is showing up is that I’m talking a lot more to people in public, cutting through the business of social roles and addressing them as another wandering soul hungry for love that I’m connected to in this life. In any given moment there’s an opportunity for us to make each other happy, or at least be decent to each other, so I’ve been trying to do more of that lately.

How this manifested last night was that I fell into conversation with two neat guys, Malcolm and History. Yeah, his nickname was History, which I loved. They were very bright, very funny guys. The fact that they bought me two pints of 80/- and a whisky just endeared them to me further.

And now it’s Sunday. I’ve got a completely free, nothing day, and I’m just relaxing.

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To Belarusia with love.
Friday, April 22, 2005 , 10:52 AM

I’ve been looking for non-leather shoes. Most of what’s available on the net looks like it was woven from coconuts by monkeys.

~

Life advances, and is good. Nothing specific to report.

The most interesting thing I’ve been working on for The Coach is an article about a trip our marketing director took to Belarus recently. A client of ours set up an organisation that, to date, has brought over $20 million worth of medical supplies, food, and other goods to the country. My co-worker went to help out on one of the organisation’s aid missions.

I didn’t know anything about Belarus until starting to research this piece, but, man, they have it bad. First Chernobyl coughed evil on their country, contaminating about 20% of the land with radioactive isotopes that will take up to 24,400 years to become inactive. Most of the people live through subsistence farming, which means they’re regularly ingesting highly radioactive material. What do you do when the choice is between that and starving?

Then the country got a despot for president, who dragged the nation back into the Cold War. He keeps passing measures to extend his rule as leader, while making his opponents “disappear”. Condoleeza Rice called President Lukashenko “the last dictator in Europe” — and this, coming from her! Amnesty International aren’t very fond of him, either.

But this client of ours is persisting through the maze of red tape and bureaucracy to help these people. He thanks our company, saying that this is only possible because of the income and free time that he created in our program. It’s nice to see how many of these entrepreneurs reach a level of success where they’re not interested in the money anymore. They want to create something more, something lasting. And they turn to philanthropy. Being inventive and powerful people, they produce some impressive and moving results.

The article will appear in the next issue of Strategic eNews (the newsletter I write for The Strategic Coach).

The challenge in writing the piece is that I can’t get political. It’s not our style, and it wouldn’t help the mission, because the president is already highly suspicious of anything from the west. Even writing this, I’m afraid of it being linked back somehow to that good work.

Much of the charity’s work is with orphans, bringing them to Canada for medical treatment and for a respite from — well, from being constantly irradiated. Some isotopes can be eliminated through diet. Others, unfortunately, take firmer hold in the body. The incidence of cancer in the population there is beyond comprehension.

The orphans’ trips to Canada are a complex matter, as they can be interpreted as interference, an attempt to steal away a generation of Belarusians. Yet at home, they’re classed as non-persons. About 17% of them try to kill themselves on leaving school, because they see no future for themselves. This organisation tries to keep them in school and provide a university education for them when they get older. Perhaps this — a class of people who’ve been treated abominably but have gained a sense of self-esteem and a realisation of their own abilities — is the most frightening prospect of all to the current regime.

The current generation is only now reaching the age when they can have children of their own. No one knows how severe the effects of the radiation will be on their ability to reproduce. Some speculate that their future as a people is in doubt, unless some of these children have a chance to get well.

You can find out more about this aid mission here:Canadian Aid for Chernobyl.

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It’s raining stories.
Sunday, April 17, 2005 , 7:17 PM

I wrote seven short stories this afternoon. Really little ones, but I did it just for fun, and it was fun. Here I’d been putting off writing one, but when I approached a different way, it became easy to write a bunch of them.

Last week I finished everything I was supposed to do early one night, and was chatting to Cosgrove online. I told him I had nothing to do (not that I was bored — I think boredom is noncommittal suicide). So he challenged me to write him a one-page story. But what? For days I was wondering what to write about, but then yesterday it hit me: Write something just for him, not for any other purpose — because planning outcomes before creating the thing is the surest way to blow the creative ether out the window. Okay, I thought, but what sort of story would he like? I didn’t know, so I started flipping through genres in my head, and came up with ideas for every genre I could think of. And today I wrote them, just silly things to keep me in shape between projects, covering, respectively: suspense, horror, romance, nostalgia, science fiction, and fantasy. I sent them to him first, but I also posted them here.

~

Friday night, a bunch of us went to The Stand to see some comedy. I’m really not big on comedy, for the reason I’ve mentioned here a few times, that as an ex-performer, it’s not fun for me to watch people try so hard, and sometimes fail. I feel responsible for them, because that’s how I was trained to be as an actor.

This night was no different from any other comedy nights I’ve been to: Some funny people, often having to handle arseholes heckling from the audience, and some not-funny people, either being heckled cruelly when we all already know what’s happening, or everyone sitting in silence waiting for the pain to stop.

Three of the four acts were very good, and the one not-good one was nice. Really nice, so not laughing was tough. And the compere (or MC in North American English) was an utter, utter arsehole of a self-loathing, bitchy gay man. Unfortunately, the crowd, not being accustomed to this breed of person, mistook him for funny. “Oh! He said a dirty word for genitals and sex acts!” (Or a succession of dirty words for genitals and sex acts.) And then there was his bizarre projection onto male audience members, in which he accused them of being gay. And this was funny. Because (*titter*) gay is funny!

And I wish to fuck people would give that up.

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Another log on the fire.
Thursday, April 14, 2005 , 12:17 PM

Here’s another short story. This one’s called “Finity“. Just a bit of fun. It’s about an insurance salesman at the end of the world:

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Londrunk.
Monday, April 11, 2005 , 10:29 AM

This weekend, I went down to London with Patrick. We had a great weekend, though a list of what we did wouldn’t take up much space. It was a time better measured in relationship distance: I met his friends Owen and Stéphanie, and instantly understood why he likes them both so much. We stayed at Owen’s and had a very ‘European’ evening with Steph, eating marzipan and drinking citron pressé then going to a French café to eat wine, olives, and bread. Admittedly, it was a chain, but it’s a chain that has bottled fin de siécle Paris perfectly. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Hemingway there in a corner, sharpening a little pencil with a knife into a saucer. With both of these people, I felt an instant rapport and immediately enjoyed the happy friction that is good conversation full of laughs — a kind of mental frottage, if you’ll excuse the expression.

We also went to Heaven, London’s Big Gay Club, but this happened, like everything else in the weekend, by accident. We made no plans, and everything flowed together, which is not only my recipe for a good weekend (since my weekly plans are usually tight), but for a great vacation. On this occasion, one of Owen’s friends, whom we met while sitting around in a pub called Retro, where Owen knew everyone who walked through the door, breezed us past a queue and some security, into a huge brick chamber under Charing Cross Station, much like The Arches in Glasgow. We were soon being handed glasses of champagne. I’m not a club person, but if I’m going to be there, this seemed a nice way to do it.

The main feature of the weekend for me was my friendship with Patrick. We’ve travelled some, but usually by car. Going by plane was going to be different, I figured, having to sort out the flights and trains. As I’d anticipated, his company was an utter pleasure. We’ve known each other for almost four years, and we’ve worked a lot on this friendship. As a result, we know how to handle each other really well, how to have the best time when it’s good, and how to take control in situations where the other is out of his element.

My blissed-out state lasted the whole weekend, as a mad rush of incredibly varied people streamed past me everywhere, and I loved watching them all, being amongst them (though that intensity of human energy would be wearing if I lived in it; Edinburgh is much slower, even as a capital city). Also, there were a few hitches, but Patrick joined me in a gentle, responsive mindset. For instance, we missed our return flight yesterday, so we went away to talk about alternatives, then went back and put our credit cards on the desk. As the owner of the company I write for says, “If you’ve got enough money to solve the problem, you don’t have the problem.” We then set about chatting and people-watching for four hours.

When we got on the plane, we were surrounded by French students in their early teens, who bounced up and down in their seats like a game of Whack-a-Mole (with no mallet in sight), and talked excitedly to each other in a very gutteral accent. I sat thinking, “I could be annoyed at them, but I bet I could see this another way.” Then it occurred to me: they weren’t being annoying, they were being excited about travelling. It was still disruptive after that, but it wasn’t bothersome. This seems to be the key lately, getting how few things in the world lately are actually about me. We didn’t manage to catch up with Tim, and I didn’t even hear from him at all. I immediately went into an old reactive mode, thinking, “Well, fine then, if he can’t be bothered getting in touch with me…” Then I thought about his show, the number of band-gigs he’s doing, and the fact that he’s the father of two, one of whom is an infant. I had no idea what was up, but after that it was easy to imagine it wasn’t about me. Besides which, do I want to be pissed at an old friend and drift away from him, or do I want to know this neat guy? The answer was easy, and I dropped it.

So this is how the weekend went, constantly choosing to go with the fun option, not getting snagged on anything. Patrick is a smart, funny person to be around, but the fact that he shared this mindset made the whole time a great getaway.

P.S. We didn’t drink that much; Friday was the only wild time. But during it, that title popped into my head, and I had to use it.

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Everythingness.
Thursday, April 07, 2005 , 7:32 PM

The experience I had the other night was not a fleeting thing. For a few days now, I’ve had this constant experience of it. It’s blissful.

I realised how antagonistic my approach to other people I encounter in public is. Instead, the past few days I’ve been dealing with others as — not even quite brothers or sisters, but as literally being me. We’re all part of the same stuff. In this mode of thought, antagonism isn’t just negative, it’s silly. How can you be aggressive toward a part of yourself?

Yesterday I wrote a letter to the editor who has my book. I sent it off this morning, and for a change didn’t feel nervous about it at all. There’s nothing “out there” to achieve because there is no “out there” out there. I am, and that as far as it goes. There are things I want to achieve in life, but these days I’m after them because they seem fun, not because I believe they’ll fix or change anything. They don’t have to, because there’s nothing wrong, nothing missing. It’s just games to play; no results will make me any more real or alive. All that is already here in this moment.

I’m sitting in a food court near the train station, having found a nice little natural foods store. All these people around me — the oldsters with their tea, the bored staff on their breaks, the laughing friends, the parents with their children (whom I find cute!), the bewildered-looking street-person gawking at the cabinet full of sweets, even the smokers! — I love them.

I’m waiting to take the train out to Patrick‘s, ’cause we’re off to London together tomorrow. I’m very happy to be going in this state of mind. I’m going to have a lot of fun. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with my friend Tim, who’s in a show there, but at any rate I’ll meet Patrick’s friend Owen, who’s just existed until now as one of those people on the Internet.

I’ve also caught up with another friend, Gareth, who I’d lost touch with — which is not right, ’cause he’s a bright guy I like. We went to The Filmhouse, where we saw Ma Mere, arguably the most depraved movie I’ve ever seen. It took us some time to decompress afterward: we didn’t hate it, but it explored a lot of uncomfortable boundaries without apology or hesitation. I knew it dealt with an incestuously close mother-son relationship, but I was very wrong to think that was the risky ace up its sleeve. Oh no. It just kept going and going, often for no seeming reason except to go. I had a terrible sleep last night because this movie was in my head, recasting relationships from the distant past in new, conflicted ways. But nothing it imagined was as warped or convoluted as the situations those characters put themselves into.

Work is good. I’ve lots to work on, including some a fun interview with one of our staff who went to visit one of our entrepreneur clients in Belarus, where he’s set up a medical relief organisation. We’re not just about making people rich. With most of the entrepreneurs, they reach a point where the money isn’t the point, and they ask themselves “What can I do with this that will matter?” And they do some pretty touching, pretty big things.

Yay! I just received an e-mail approving a sales fax I did the “fancy writing” on from a brief. The last one went through eight revisions, so getting it in one feels nice.

It’s funny that I read my writing guru Natalie Goldberg going on and on about this Zen awareness stuff for years, but never took an interest in it. Now I see how this is useful for a writer, to witness the world this way, and to respect all of it. I don’t know what more to say about it. Words don’t really touch it.

I realise how kooky this probably sounds, but I don’t care. This offers me things I don’t want to miss. It gives me permission to go wherever I need to go creatively and honour that, not try to make it fit into a nice and presentable form. But the biggest payoff is that it turns off that constant background noise I’ve had for so many years, that longing, the worry, the incompleteness. The world of dualities is the beginning of suffering. Suffering’s no fun.

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I can see my house from here.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005 , 12:54 PM

As the French would say: Super-cool! Nasa has released a piece of open-source (e.g. free) software that lets you browse the whole Earth in real time.

It’s called NASA World Wind. This should give us something to play with until Google Maps expands beyond the US.

~

Apologies if it seems like I’m not replying to your e-mails. Somehow my SMTP server has got on a blacklist, so my messages are being bounced back from Yahoo and some other mail hosts. I’m pursuing this with my host; hopefully we can clear this up quickly.

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Recycled.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005 , 3:22 PM

Yay! I took my recycling to the depot today and discovered that there’s a new bin for cardboard, plastic bottles, and drink boxes. Hazzah! My rubbish output has just been halved. Congratulations, Edinburgh, on getting that together.

I’m sitting in the Central Library, where the blue sky blazes through the glass in the four walls around me. It’s still a bit chilly — in here, too. I’m going to move soon.

There’s a man two tables in front of me reading newspapers, wearing garden gloves. Does newspaper ink still smudge? I rarely read the things, since I get all my information on the web and through RSS feeds. I try not to read too much of the news. Feeding tubes, celebrities, murders, mergers, and popes get tired fast, and are irrelevant to my daily existence.

Last night I lay in bed, where sometimes I’m struck with heavy thoughts about the future — my own, my family’s. Admittedly, I was feeling a bit lonely, too, even though I don’t particularly want a relationship. The way I’m thinking lately, the drive to relationship is more of an addiction to the endorphins and other associated chemicals than it is an actual need. The other person is practically a variable. It’s also, I dunno, sometimes it seems a way to avoid being conscious or working on what’s important, hiding out in someone else.

I lay there, thinking about all this, wondering about what two different people said to me while I was chatting online: “Why are you not with someone? You’re so [this and that]…” I had no answer for them. I thought about my parents, being together these forty-odd years, and how strange that would seem to me.

Then something odd happened: I stopped feeling like a separate, distinct entity. Loneliness and separation clearly belonged to the same illusion: There wasn’t me and the universe, there was just the universe, with me as part of it. I felt it flowing through me (which I suppose it does, since I’ve none of the cells or atoms in me that I did just a few years ago). I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

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No more capless pens.
Friday, April 01, 2005 , 10:03 AM

I just discovered the best thing: the Mailing Preference Service. It’s the postal equivalent of a “No-call” list. I have to walk a few blocks to the back of the B&Q hardware shop to put my recycling in big dumpsters. Every bit of junk mail means I have to go sooner. And I’m sorry, charities, sending me a biro in the mail does notmake me want to write you a cheque. It pains me that over 90% of the things that I throw out each week are recyclable in Toronto — and this is a small country!

~

I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (in two sittings, as Liz suggested it would probably take). I enjoyed it, and find it funny how acutely aware it’s made me of my own idiosyncracies — except I can’t excuse them away with a syndrome. As I read the book, I found myself wishing I could, though. For instance, in the gay community in Toronto, people often took the liberty of greeting me and saying goodbye with a kiss on the lips. It was intended as a caring gesture, but for me it was always like having someone cop a feel. It would have been great to just scream, curl up in a ball on the floor, or bark at them like a dog. “Oh, it’s okay. He just does that because he’s got Hamefelter’s Syndrome.”

~

Tonight a few of the Friday Gang and I are having supper at Karen’s, then going to see a jazz band calledHejira. The tracks on the band’s website sound uber-cool, so I’m looking forward to it.

~

Last night I worked until 2AM. I’d juggled my schedule a bit during the day, and was surprised that what I took to be a simple job ended up taking a lot more effort. Patrickcame over in the evening for Writing Night (something new we’re doing), at which I did the remaining layout work for the Dunderheid ‘zine, then when he left I got down to work… And didn’t get up again until it was very late.

But I loved it. Things have been slow lately with work, and that’s when my mind grows cobwebs. But this, reworking the copy for the new company website, was like a mad hike through the jungle. It wasn’t work, it wasfun.

<

p>I’m grateful for the life I have.

Commentary on commentators.
, 8:40 AM

I think that I will never read another book review. I was just reading one from Slate about a new novel. (I guess that’s redundant.) I grew more interested as I learned the book was a magic realist story. Then the commentators took a swipe at the writer, just a mild one, but I was left thinking, “Who are these people to be talking abouthim?“

Taking a step backwards, I now look at the whole ofSlate, and I wonder what it’s for. It’s a bunch of gas-bags venting about current events and cultural inventions, sounding clever, but adding nothing.

If there’s an information equivalent to toxic shock, I’m there. Last night I sat and read a hundred pages of a book, and my brain was itching like a junky to get back to the computer.

Ahead of me, through the library windows, I see a herd of triangular, slate-covered roofs. Some have terracotta chimney-pots coming up out of them, and one has a television aerial.

Right now, there’s nothing wrong. This state of mind is a lasting bit of the awareness practice reading I did. I was walking in town today, passing by the great gorge between the Regent Road and the Old Town, which contains the train station and other odds and ends, and I looked at the sky. It had — and still has — a colour like newsprint. I checked my feelings, which were flat.Something’s wrong, my brain thought habitually. But just as quickly, it occurred to me that something was only wrong if I was obliged to feel one particular way. The mind is hungry for consistency like that: “Always happy! Always happy! Sameness! Survival!” I took what I was feeling and was satisfied with it. The sky was not “grim”; it was blank, yet to be printed on.

It’s been cool again lately, and not so spring-like. I don’t resent the season I’m in anymore, or hope for the next one. As an aging, mortal creature with much to lose, I’m not in any hurry for time to pass.

Nice weekend.
Monday, March 28, 2005 , 5:02 PM

Friday: Chat at Liz‘s and drinks at Pivo.

Saturday: Talked with the family on Skype for ages, then went out to Patrick’s, where we watched the launch of the new Doctor Who, which was gladdeningly charming. It was fun to be here for the start (or re-start) of something so quintessentially British.

Sunday: Liz had an Easter egg hunt for a bunch of us in her flat, which reduced us to six-year-olds. More conversation ensued, people went off their separate ways, then Liz and I went to see The Machinist, a very stylish film that veered uncomfortably close to Fight Club, without being anywhere as important. Ultimately, it seemed to be an exercise in displaying how Method-ically skinny Christian Bale could make himself. Icky.

It’s grey, rainy, and kinda cold again.

Are you not thinking yet?
Friday, March 25, 2005 , 1:12 PM

Relax, I’m not referring to dismantling the universe or anything like that… This time.

My editor asked me to read a book on web usability, because we’re writing copy for the next iteration of the company’s website. (Which, thanks to the team, especially my beloved Margaux, is going to be very pretty.)

The book is called Don’t Make Me Think!. Ironically, it immediately got me thinking about my own website. I haven’t changed it in several years, mainly ’cause I’m not doing the web design thing anymore, so I don’t need it as a showcase. I also couldn’t think of anything better. But it always did kinda bug me that the navigation was a bit weird and non-intuitive; it required you to click something here, then notice something over there. That’s a level of thinking, exactly the sort of thing this author Steve Krug says should be eliminated to help your readers/users. Add to this the fact that I never used two of the four categories.

The book is a quick and practical read, and as I went through it I immediately saw what else I could do instead, which is either a testament to him, or to my having gained some distance from the old design.

Anyway, here it is. I’ve still got some decorating to do, but it’s built and the walls are painted.

As a seasoned web designer, I know that the first thing everyone says on the launch of a new website is “Why didn’t you–?”, “Couldn’t it–?”, “I don’t like how–“, or “This is broken.” If you’re reading this, know that I love you, but, er… don’t. My intention (in starting yesterday afternoon and working until 4:30 in the morning) was to build a simple, easy-to-modify website, and this works for me.

Where in the noosphere is Hamish?
Wednesday, March 23, 2005 , 8:44 PM

Busy. I’ve been juggling a few things, and finishing off my head-sorting, life-sorting work. Or so I thought: Having worked through the Zen-ish book, I’m left in an open field, looking up at clouds and stars. It’s a big, happy blank. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. I’m not separate from anything. So now comes the tricky balance between moving toward things I want in life and not missing each moment of existence.

Onto more practical, understandable matters: Any e-mail sent to my in-box on Thursday went into the aether, never to be seen again. I was in-between web hosts. Apologies if your message was one of them.

Saturday, March 19, 2005 , 3:15 PM

Last night I went out to Patrick’s with Philip and Murray, where we found Patrick, Liz, Geoff, Keith, and Anita making supper. I’d hyperlink their names to all their various blogs, but I can’t be arsed: I’m sitting in Princes Street Gardens.

I just finished the last session in the preparation course for Powerful Partnerships, the “citizen’s advocacy” group I’ve got involved with. Last night was a blast: I had a really good time with my mates, got home at a reasonable hour, and yet I had a terrible sleep. My main thought this morning was just to survive this final day in the course so I could go home and have a nap.

It helps to have a theme when approaching a day, but “I’m sleepy” seemed a sure-fire way to have a lousy time, learn nothing, and make no valuable contribution. Plus they gave us biscuits and sandwiches. I also bought a big bottle of water — hydration helps with tiredness. Though every damned liquid product in this country has f*ing sugar in it, as this lime-water proved to, too. Why?!

So the session was valuable and dropped in the last missing pieces, addressing my concerns about being an advocate. The group also had a fun dynamic, which has raised my confidence throughout about this being a good experience.

So now it’s all over, and what’s next is for me to start meeting real people, one of whom I’ll actually end up being an advocate for. The preparation is over.

And this day! There’s no way I want to take a nap now and miss this beautiful warmth, the daffodils bursting from the ground, the warm sun kick-starting my pineal gland into making me feel springtime happy. So now I’m sat in the gardens with pairs and groups of people walking past or sitting on the lawns, every other one of them with an ice cream cone in their hand.

Unfortunately, I haven’t got much mental energy to do much else than just sit here. But this is enough, isn’t it? All the effort, all the striving, is about enjoying a great quality of life, and this is definitely a good moment, not to be missed.

A throng of people just went past making a ruckus. They’re rehearsing the passion play that’s to happen here next week. (Like Beltane, only instead of the resurrected Green Man, it’s a guy in a bathrobe. Same myth, different spiritual costume designer.) I found out about the passion play today from a young medical student who showed up to the session late. He’s going to be taking part in it. Meanwhile, as the Practice Christ is dragged past, Rufus Wainwright sings “Instant Pleasure” into my ears through my headphones: “I don’t want somebody to love me/Just give me sex whenever I want it.” Hee.

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Out of touch.
Friday, March 18, 2005 , 12:53 AM

Sorry for not responding properly to e-mails for the past few days. I’ve not had proper access to my mailservers.Aaargh! After spending fifty quid to move to a new web-host, along with talking endlessly to various technical support people, it turns out that the issue was just my router. How did I solve the problem? Unplugging it and plugging it back in.

Lord.

For every bit of capability these machines add, they make an equal demand in time and money.

~

I wanted to share my favourite poems that were read the other night. Happily, they all seem to be in the public domain, or at least posted elsewhere on the Internet (in varying degrees of eye-boiling web design):

“Song of Myself”, Section 6
Walk Whitman

“The Last Words of My English Grandmother”
William Carlos Williams

“A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”
Frank O’Hara

“The Housedog’s Grave”
Robinson Jeffers

“The Fish”
Elizabeth Bishop

“The Steeple-Jack”
Marianne Moore

“Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge”
Hart Crane
(NB: It’s a bit buried on the page. Best do a search for “Hart Crane”)

Wednesday, March 16, 2005 , 1:34 PM

Last night, I went to The Scottish Poetry Library for an event in a series called “Selected Works.” Philip told me about it, and was going to meet me there, except when he was stopped at the corner of St Mary and Holyrood, a prostitute jumped in his car just as the light changed. He didn’t make it on time — not because he accepted her very forward offer, but because he had to drive around the block to put her back where he found her. We met afterward in the Regent Pub, and I told him that I didn’t mind, ’cause that’s the best excuse anyone’s ever given me for being late.

The poems were selected and most of them read by an American named Mark Doty. I’d not heard of him before, but that means nothing, as I’ve not heard of most poets. I was happy that he wasn’t a Gay Poet, which is more or less how Phil set up the event for me, but instead was just a person. The topic wasn’t hidden, but it didn’t come to the fore because it wasn’t at issue in the conversation.

Instead, the evening was about savouring the voices of Doty’s favourite poets. I have the list of readings in my jacket pocket, and want to search them all out again, because they were beautiful, aurally delicious. Whitman, Dickenson, Jeffers, Crane, Williams and a few others — their thoughts came from the past through the magic of inscription and rereading, and unfolded again in the air, fresh, new, and moving for us. It helped that Doty is a very good reader. But those words! Prose is like water — nourishing, essential — but poetry, something I don’t usually partake in, poetry is intoxicating liquor. Some of it’s rough booze, but what we heard last night was like a swig of good, open, unpretentious wine. I was drunk as I heard those words, and felt challenged to wake up, wake up, wake up! to everything, the sublime and the frightening, that which affirms and that which destroys.

Philip’s ex’s uncle (it took me a bit to get it, too) joined us at The Regent. He’d not been carjacked by prostitutes, so he made it to the event. He’s been a fan of Doty’s for years, so this evening was a special event for him. It turns out that he works with Ottakar’s, the bookseller, and has in his head exactly everything I don’t know about Scottish publishing. I need to follow up with him.

I’ve had no time in the last day and won’t have time today to pick up my “investigation”, which leaves me a bit unsettled. Tonight is another training session with the crisis advocacy group, then Saturday is an all-day session, the final bit of training. I’m not sure where this is all going, or how it will fit in. Meanwhile, RyanAir has just announced a cheap hostel service, and I’m sorely tempted to run away. I haven’t got the spare cash, and my debts are at zero, so I don’t want to mess with that.

Ah, but here’s something you can help me with, if you’re so inclined: (Since it’s been pointed out that I rarely ask for help, and thus don’t give people in my life a chance to contribute to me.) I’m hearing nothing back from the publisher regarding Idea in Stone. This doesn’t mean anything, and isn’t necessarily bad. My inclination is to leave it, because being forceful with editors goes over as well as declaring “I love you” to a date: they run away. But FFS, it’s coming on a year since I finished the book. I want to do something with it. Whaddya think? Should I…

• Leave it alone. After all, they said they’d get in touch when they knew anything. And they’ve said good things about the novel. Best not to foul things up when you’ve found someone who ‘gets’ the book.
• Gently inquire, asking how it’s going.
• Gently inquire, asking if they’ve made a decision.
• Write and ask if there’s a timeframe for making the decision.
• Write and ask if they’ve made a decision, because (EEK!) I would like to try other presses if they’re not going ahead with the project.
• Something else I haven’t thought of.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or insights you might have.

Monday, March 14, 2005 , 5:41 PM

Crap. A nice lady just brought her little pink bundle of joy with a green Pizza Hut balloon tied to it into the coffeeshop where I’m working, and sat it in front of me. Actually, the little girl is very well-behaved, so I should shut up. I generally resent children in public. I don’t know where else they’re supposed to go.

Lord, I’m way deep into this Zen process of “dismantling” myself. So now I’m stuck looking at “What is it about how children are allowed to be that I resent?” The answers to this stuff invariably have a greebly, ugly component to them.

It’s all The World of Opposites, the continnua on which we find ourselves. Babies represent complete lack of self-control, and I work very hard at self-control. I resent their freedom. I resent their messiness and the disturbance they bring, because I work very hard at being “good” and polite and not bothering others in public. What am I afraid I would become if I were not “in control”?

I am the baby.

“Awareness practice” is like an X-ray that disintegrates everything it’s pointed at. Decidedly uncomfortable, but I’ve a feeling this process is going to prove very valuable in the end. The worst is realising just now that I’m not going to “get” this one, to work everything out and then be finished once and for all.

The good news is that I’m finding the little girl cute, and can’t help smiling.

P.S. From that coffeeshop, I moved on to the Forest Cafe to use their WiFi to send some files to work. Not only did I have problems connecting to my e-mail servers (for some inexplicable reason, and I can defend my technological reasons to be stymied), apparently I moved onto the next level in the me-with-kids videogame: there was a little boy there who climbed around me, made noise, and kept wanting to “Can I try?” with my equipment. Then there were the neoHippies around me, each of whom had their own annoying thing, like action figures designed to piss me off in specific ways.

Now I’m back home in my space, my sanctuary, about to cook my supper and get back into my work (not my work-work, but this other work that I’ve been talking about here).

I just read through a “magazine” I picked up at the health food store where I buy my popcorn. It had about three actual articles in it, and everything else was a veiled or not-veiled-at-all advertisement for bits of pseudoscientific magical jiggery-pokery that promised to make everything alright. Tempting, but I’m not falling for it. My salvation does not lie in a silver amulet the size of a sand-dollar, a cream to affect my magnetic field (I kid you not), or a spinal cord stimulator. (Sorry spinal cord. I know you wanted it.)

Zender-bender
, 12:57 PM

It’s all kinda funny: I’ve been watching the DVD of I [Heart] Huckabees lately, with all the commentary tracks and such. I really enjoyed the movie back when Geoffand I first saw it, because it reminded me of the workshop work I did back in the Nineties. Watching it when I got the DVD was amusing at first, then as I listened to the director talking about its themes, it got a bit unsettling.

This weekend I started doing the work I’ve been putting off, the investigation into what’s going on in my life lately — or not going on, or what I need to decide, or where I’m going, all that stuff — and things started getting freaky. I chose a book by a woman named Cheri Huber to use as a structure for looking at this stuff, because a book she wrote about relationships continues to be one of the most profound and perplexing wake-up calls I’ve encountered on the topic.

I started honestly delving into the work in the book, which is based on Zen awareness practice, and I found myself laughing when the exact same themes and terms emerged as in Huckabees. Except Huckabees is supposed to be a comedy! Then again, as the Zen masters say “If you’re not laughing, you’re not getting it.”

This is really hard work because it tills up all the unconscious, unquestioned bits of living that come from our social conditioning. It demands that you slip around corners fast enough to see your conditioned self coming, it–

I’ve got to stop here. This is a realm where, as Barthes said about love, everything written says too much, yet not enough.

I’m “dismantling”. That’s what they call it, and that’s what it feels like. Sure, it’s self-absorbed, but I think this is the level of work that’s available and required in a society where the lower parts of the Maslovian pyramid are all taken care of. I could just go have a pint, and in doing so I could miss the key to my whole existence. Of course, the key isn’t real, it’ll just be something I make up — but that’s a hell of a lot more useful than having nothing.

I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’m ready for it. It’s a bit scary that everything has to fall apart first, but there’s a point, as in Joseph Campbell’s “cosmogonic round”, where you can’t really refuse the call, ’cause your previous life doesn’t fit anymore. What’s funny is that things might end up looking exactly the same on the outside after all this. I don’t know yet.

My buddy Cosgrove mentioned on his blog that he feels left out when I go into my cave like this, but I honestly don’t know how to involve someone else in this work.

~

Stray thoughts I had over the weekend:

I’ve never seen a dog eat an apple.

Musketeers are famous for using swords, which is a bit odd, given their name. I guess “Rapierists” didn’t test well.

H.A.L.T.
, 10:21 AM

My friend Paul pointed this out to me this morning:
Mt. St. Helens erupts

So at least I’m well tuned in.

I had a good sleep last night. Funny what a difference that makes. A counsellor shared something brilliant with me several years ago: Our moods are aggravated by four factors, which can be summarised as H.A.L.T. — Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. I’ve still got the same questions to answer, but being rested sure adds to my coping skills.

And it’s sunny.

Perfect: the storm!
, 1:30 AM

I found out what the storm was in my dream this morning. It was a time-hiccup: This evening I saw Flight of the Phoenix with Liz, in which a plane-full of people huddled together against certain death in plane passing through a swirling, miles-high desert sandstorm.

What my mind was using it to represent, and why it stuck Toronto in there, I’m not sure.

Something wicked this way comes.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005 , 2:59 PM

This morning I had a dream that there was a giant black cloud full of debris advancing over Toronto. I watched as the CN Tower bent over sideways, lost integrity, and collapsed down on itself. I was in Toronto to see a small theatre group put on a play I’d written, and we wound up hiding in the basement of the venue, waiting to see what was going to happen, how big this storm was. We didn’t know if it was local or global in scale, but we had a pretty good idea we weren’t going to make it out alive.

Button it.
, 12:40 AM

Walking home tonight after dinner with my friends Geoffand Alison, I saw a button on the sidewalk. I walked past it, then had this crushing sensation that everything in the universe depended on my going back and picking it up.

So I stopped, went back, and got the button. As I continued home with a smile on my face, rubbing the button between my fingers, I mentally began to deconstruct what a button could mean, symbolically imposing itself on my evening like that. Fastening things together. Oh, but loss: bad luck to lose a button, and no good luck gained by finding one…

Of late, I have been experiencing ontological panic. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who I am. I don’t even know what beingmeans.

It’s likely a phase, and I’m confident that there’s something good on the other side of it. But I’m not there, and it’s uncomfortable.

Today I stood in the train station for a while, trying to feel where I was. I got glimpses, flashes.

Universe, I know you’re listening. Send me the next bit. I think you’re going to have to spell it out a bit more — not in buttons.

Passion, permission.
Thursday, March 03, 2005 , 3:15 PM

“Oh aye, but now Michael Flateley is a big, fat slob. He’s go’ a beer belly on ‘im. ‘E used tae be worth millions.”

I’m sitting in a little cafe in Corstorphine, waiting for my catch-up meeting with the “crisis advocacy group”. I figured I’d leave really early this time, so of course I’m here with scads of time to spare. Happily, I’ve got work with me to do, and I have a little gaggle of women sitting at the table next to me, chattering about what’s on the telly, their health problems, and other immediate concerns. The singsongy lilt of their voices is charming.

Last night Geoff and I went to see The Woodsman. It stars Kevin Bacon as a man just released after serving a prison term for child-molestation. Talk about a challenging subject! The film took no Hollywood shortcuts; it brought us right up to the precipice of our discomfort, but it was very responsible to its characters and to the audience for our willingness to go to such a dangerous place. This movie could have been wrong in so many ways, which made its treatment of its subject all the more right. If it doesn’t win awards, it will only be because the general moviegoing audience and movie academy members are afraid to engage with or even acknowledge the subject matter. That would be a shame, because the story isn’t using it to shock or horrify, but to directly explore one of our least-explored societal fears, and manages to reach a resolution — gently and honestly, simultaneously satisfying the demands of story structure and of psychological reason.

One of my university professors challenged us fledgling young actors to figure out what was good and what was bad, and to be able to articulate why. He demanded that we develop a sense of taste. How this usually manifests now is that, after experiencing something good, bad, or mediocre, I babble about it, trying to figure out exactly what made it so.

In my mental run-off after the film, I wondered aloud to Geoff why I found the movie so disturbing. I shared a thought that flashed through my mind late in the film: “Paedophilia is not without comparison in social revulsion to homosexuality.”

“Dude! Get out of my head!” said Geoff. (As a grown man, he barely gets away with saying “Dude!”) He’d thought the same thing.

Watching this character try to integrate into a society that reviles his inhereing passions was uncomfortably familiar. For the most part my life consists of situations and relationships where my sexuality isn’t an issue, so I’m not claiming this as a current trouble, but rather something that I recognised in the story as the context in which my emotions developed. The movie character’s adult situation was much like mine as a child and a youth, feeling things for people that were unwanted and inappropriate, and not knowing how to be any other way, even though examples of “the other way” are everywhere, all around.

No wonder we’re obsessed with it as adults. I can’t remember who it was who said, “At one time it was the love that dare not speak its name, and now you can’t get it to shut up.” No wonder so many people go permanently to camp when they finally find permission to be what they already are.

~

I vastly overpaid my credit card recently because I’ve been getting money back in refunds, and from selling off the spare Pocket PCs I’ve accumulated in my leapfrogging between failing bits of equipment. The danger, of course, is of treating this as a great big gift certificate. I’ve bought a bunch of DVDs and books I’m excited about, but I’m not comfortable with having shopping as one of my activities.

One of the tasks I set for myself this week, more apposite because of this sudden influx of cash, is “When am I driven to shop and why?”

I came to my answer this morning: I shop when I’m lacking direction, when I’m setting up the stage for creative work (sometimes instead of actually doing that work), or when I want to interact with things because I don’t feel trusting of people. None of this is new, but in articulating it I have an opportunity to alter it. Whether I’m moving to Canada or not, I don’t want to accumulate more stuff. Buying a few movies and feeling sick, like I’d overeaten, is a bit funny, given that I don’t own a car, a house, a closet full of suits, furniture, a television, or most of the things people own. It’s a pretty minimalist existence I maintain, but I keep trying to find a way to throw even more ballast overboard. The biggest challenge, of course, is the technical gear, since it represents the biggest potential to me. Case in point: I’m able to write this in a cafe. I’m also saving 40% of my income, so it’s not like there’s a problem here.

I dunno, I’ve got this background noise lately, this confusion, a lack of direction. I want to find out what that’s about rather than hiding behind purchases and playing videogames.

Making things. I feel excited, thinking about the idea of making new things, even if for no obvious reason, even if I just give them away, rather than buying things for no obvious reason. This is good timing, ’cause I’ve got to do the design and layout for the ‘zine.

I just saw Ros, my contact at this organisation, cycling by. Lord, I’ve been blithering on here for half an hour.

And now, a word from our corporate pharmaceutical sponsor…
, 6:18 PM

Okay, I normally don’t do the meta-filter thing, as I’m supposed to be a writer and a creative being and all that, but this made me laugh:

“Progenitorivax.”

~

A little while ago, a yellow van drove through my neighbourhood blaring something from a loudspeaker. It went around the block a couple of times, so I went to the window to listen. As a city-dweller, my natural tendency is to ignore broadcast messages and other noises, because they’re usually irrelevant and intrusive. Turns out this one was actually important. Apparently there’s been a break in a water main, so they’re shutting off water in the Albion Road area.

<

p>I was kinda hoping it was an alien attack. Instead, it just made me get on with cooking my supper on time.

Bollocksing buses!
Saturday, February 26, 2005 , 12:31 PM

This morning I was to attend the first training meeting with a volunteer organisation. I got up early, I’d checked the bus routes last night, I caught the Number 1 bus, and…

@#$%ing Lothian buses! Their maps are completely vague, just coloured lines with place-names, which only helps if you already know the layout of the place you’re going to. You step onto a bus you don’t know, and it’s like hitting the bloody hyperspace button: you never know where you’ll end up. In this case, I ended up about an hour’s walk away from the other end of Corstorphine, where the meeting was taking place. It started at 10; by the time I got there at 10:30, the front door was locked, and ringing the bell would have likely disrupted the group, requiring one of the organisers to answer it.

I met with a woman from the organisation yesterday, and we had a great chat. I realised while talking to her that I have more to offer than I’d appreciated, because of all the self-development/workshop/thinking work I’ve done. I’ve sorted some things out along the way, and — while I still have light years to go on my own path — it seems like I owe it to, I dunno, something, to give some of it back.

Not today, apparently.

I took the bus back to town, and bought some groceries and some price-chopped videogames so I can spend the afternoon killing people without consequence.

My editor was in town this past week visiting me. We had a great time. I talked so much with her that I hurt my throat one night. Not like a sore throat, but like the little adam’s apple elevator bit getting dislodged. It was so nice to spend that time with her as my friend, especially ’cause she really ‘got’ Edinburgh.

I seem to be settling in here again, getting involved in things. I’ve no idea where I’m headed, but I trust the universe.

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Free Bat-car
Sunday, February 20, 2005 , 10:40 PM

The oddest thing today: someone left this beautiful old MG parked out front of Caffe Lucano with a window rolled down and the keys on the passenger seat. It all looked strangely deliberate. The only thing missing was a sign saying “Take me so my owner can get the insurance money!”

This afternoon I went to Favorit, where I ate and wrote all day, joined partway-through by my friend Geoff, who also had some work he wanted to do and likely wouldn’t get to at home.

I finished the story! Yay me! It’s called “Finity”.

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The Maple Leaf Forever…
Friday, February 18, 2005 , 11:02 AM

This is the only picture I could find in my collection with something resembling a Canadian flag in it. (It’s me and my folks from years and years ago, when I was in a kids’ theatre production called New Canadian Kid at The Charlottetown Festival.)

Today is the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of the Canadian flag.

I am deeply proud to be Canadian.

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There’s more Scottish magic realism tonight than there was last night.
Thursday, February 17, 2005 , 10:41 PM

1600 words more — whey hey! (Making the word-count of this new story around 1900.)

I lit candles all around my living room, put on some dramatically- and culturally-suggestive music, tucked myself into my writing chair at home this evening, and transcribed a story on the page as it played itself out in my head.

This one’s squarely in the realm of “I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I like it.” It feels like the territory of a book: there’s room to express and show and move. Short stories often feel like jokes to me, whereas book are conversations.

I guess I’m about a third of the way through.

I had a good day working at the library today. I’d felt fresh and focused in the morning, and walking into town made me feel even better. Things are blooming, which is pleasant, but somehow wrong in February.

I’m back working on a rewrite of a difficult project, but tomorrow I believe I’m going to finally slay it. Writing for financial advisors is a stretch for me.

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Wax sushi in front of a restaurant.
, 1:07 AM

Conducting life on the internet is like expecting a menu to make you full.

Or something.

I’ve been going through a Pocket PC juggling act, buying them, replacing them, getting them fixed, selling them on eBay, and stuff lately. This has meant me not being portable, which means staying home. Home is not a good place for work. It’s a decent living space, in a cold, granny-flat kind of way. But it is not good for work.

Hazzah! On Monday I received an Asus MyPal A730W, which has got to be the best Pocket PC I’ve ever used. I’m free again to work anywhere!

Old habits die hard, though, and a habit I’ve got into lately has been to switch on the computer first thing in the morning, and have it on until the end of the day, when I tear myself away to read for an hour before bed. I don’t know how it is for other creative people, but for me, this is like sticking my hand-blender into my skull every day and whipping my brain into a useless froth.

What is it that has this fragmenting effect on my attention? Is it the zillion bits of information to keep current on? Is it that hidden-away circus tent full of sinful wonders? Is it the infinitely twisting, wry, collective wit I want to be the equal of?

I suppose, ultimately, it’s me. The internet is just a thing (a very sparkly, dazzling, mesmeric thing, mind you). All things are mirrors.

I’ve not been doing my homework. Oh, I’m doing my work-work, ’cause I’m accountable for it: they give me money and depend on me. I’ve got this short story idea I’m really happy about. I’ve started it already, and I’ve outlined the rest. But it’s February, and I’ve been indoors a lot, scrambling my brain, waiting and waiting on things…

I’m bored.

But I don’t get bored! There’s too much to look at, to wonder at, to express in this world to ever be bored!

Unless you sit indoors.

I’ve also been chatting with strangers — something that I take up when I’m going through a period of heavy internet use. These luminous pixel-people can be beautiful and they can be clever, but ultimately, there’s a siren quality to them. They’re not even reliable sirens: sometimes the song stops and you don’t know why. The people we experience on the ‘net are all effect; you don’t see the cause. It’s a relationship with other beings who flip directions as quickly as a flag. It’s confusing, weird, and ultimately not-real.

I want more inner life. I want more outer life. The internet lives in some middle-space, one where things seldom build or contribute to real results for me. Ah, but things it promises…

It’s a great tool. But tools are only as good as they are immediately useful. It’s time to put some of these tools down, ask myself what it is I want to build here, and get down to that work. I will get a lot of time back, and I believe I will shake this dizzy-headed, nauseated feeling.

It’s almost bedtime. I’m going to sit with some music and just be.

I’ve also had a touch of a sore throat this week, like an unquenchable thirst. Or maybe I’ve just got a metaphor stuck in my mouth.

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E-vaporated.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 , 10:31 AM

Apologies if you’ve tried to e-mail me within the last day. The mailservers at my web-host have been ferkakta. This is the second time in as many weeks, and I’m considering a change. You never know with these things, though, whether the new solution will just introduce a different set of problems.

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VD
Monday, February 14, 2005 , 1:44 PM

I send you my candied heart on a stick.

Be well. You are much-loved.

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Suffering is optional.
Friday, February 11, 2005 , 11:26 AM

I first heard that sentiment years ago when I was attending a workshop. I got it at the time, but it’s really come home for me now, and on a subject that I’ve done a lot of suffering about in the past.

There’s this thing I call “the prerogative to be upset”. When certain things happen, our society gives us an allowance to be emotional about it. This is compassionate, but what if our reaction is a bad one, if it’s not useful to us, if it keeps us stuck in an old pattern?

I used to meet with a group of friends in Toronto for monthly dinners that were a social extension of the workshop training we’d all done. We’d bring in whatever commitments, projects, or issues we were working on at that point in our lives, share them with each other, and get whatever coaching the others might be inspired to give. It sounds very touchy-feely and luvvy, but sometimes the coaching was rough. We departed from the normal mollycoddling, and ventured into the realm of “ruthless compassion”. Sometimes indulging in a person’s suffering isn’t nice at all; it just keeps them stuck repeating themselves in life ad infinitum. Ruthless compassion could be paraphrased as “calling someone on their bullshit to spare them future suffering”. Lord, but we could use more of that!

I have been in a state of joy the past few days. This thing happened in my life, and I find that I’m not trying to put words to my position on it, justifying myself. I don’t know why I feel the way I do; it’s part of who I am. Any reason I come up with for my choice is just a bunch of verbal gook I pile on top of the instinctive, soul-level knowledge about the situation: not okay. With this, though, also comes a tremendous peace: it is okay for the other person, and that’s fine.

There’s that, but then there’s the suffering component, too: I’ve realised I don’t have to react to this in a prescripted way. No sitting at home, listening to Mme Butterfly, clicking the lamp on and off. No blaring “All By Myself” while eating chocolates. None of that junk. In fact, I’m even daring to laugh about it. I’m going to a big party Saturday night. Part of me says, “Wait! That’s the wrong reaction. You’re allowed to be — supposed to be — upset here!”

But I don’t want to be. My life is great. Ultimately, I’m the person I want to find, so nothing’s missing. I am my own Valentine. It feels nice.*

*(It also means that I’m not going to unwittingly support exploitative labour practices by purchasing flowers and chocolate from bad people.)

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Sharp corner ahead.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005 , 11:37 PM

I just got a call from the fella I met at Christmas. He instant-messaged me on Skype, saying he wanted to talk to me about something. It’s never good when someone opens with that.

He wants to date someone else.

So that’s that.

We had a whole conversation, and I was happy that I took everything that my wise friends have said to me over the past several weeks and managed to respond from my heart, and not too much from my ego. I was hurt, though not terribly surprised. And in the end, that was that. I mean, what’s to say? Everything said is too much, and doesn’t change a thing.

So, back to my life, just as I was living it, but without the mental bookmark, the promise I’d invented and maintained in my head that was, apparently, already forgotten on the other end. Would I rather be another way? Cooler? Detached? No. I like that I’m a romantic.*

Am I moving back to Canada? It stopped being about him a while back. I don’t know. I have to wait and see what’s happening with my book. I’ll know by September; this is what I’ve told myself.

I started writing a short story this evening. It’s going to be a good one. I also received nearly all the submissions from the others working with me on the Dunderheid‘zine. We’ve created some good stuff there, and it’ll be great to finally see it put together and have the opportunity to share it with others.

*Until now, I’ve had a policy of not talking about this romance stuff on here, since it overlaps with someone else’s private life. This is the last I’ll mention this incident, and I should really return to my old policy, because it’s a bit trashy talking about it out here in the open.

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Teatime and kid fears.
Thursday, February 03, 2005 , 6:21 PM

Mashed potatoes and carrots with a peppercorn sauce. Not bad, Hame.

~

Last night, Liz and I went to see a nice Scottish film called Dear Frankie. Liz is a great person to see movies with. She’s got the perfect blend of sophistication and willingness to suspend disbelief (and even to cry at the sad bits!). We ate enough candy — or I did — to send a playground full of children into diabetic shock.

I didn’t realize from the trailer that the boy in the movie was deaf. Seeing him sign to his mother made me really miss signing. Unfortunately, British Sign Language is significantly different from American Sign Language, so even if I did have an outlet for it, I’d have to start all over again. It’s something I definitely want to do more of, though I couldn’t say why.

~

Last night I stumbled across a website about Bigfoot sightings. Normally I’d think this was a hick-folk timewaster, but this had the audio of a 911 call in which a man talks about seeing this big guy outside his window. Something killed his dog a few nights before. That and the account by Teddy Roosevelt (yeah, that Teddy Roosevelt) of something sasquatchy stalking him and his hunting partner one day in the woods, which then killed his partner the next night, breaking his neck and biting it. (This is reminiscent of one sequence in The Willies, actually.) Reading this stuff late at night activated kid-fears of this thing that had been dormant since I was about nine. Happily, my rational mind didn’t have a problem convincing me that there wasn’t much danger of one having snuck into my Scottish tenement flat.

Though I do remember seeing some Whitley Streiber movie about aliens years ago that scared the bejeezus out of me with a scene of him paralyzed in his bedroom at home, having to watch while these little pale greeblies came out from the closet, from behind the dresser, from — well, you know, all those places you’re afraid they might be.

Of course, I have more to fear from Inland Revenue. Anal probe, audit… Anal probe, audit… I’m not sure which is worse.

P.S. I tried adding a comments feature to the blog just now, but the tag didn’t work for me. Sod it: I don’t feel like playing with code.

P.P.S. I can’t believe I blogged about Bigfoot. This is a new low for me. I was just about to say that we North Americans seem to be hard-wired for this silliness that Brits would never go for, but then I remembered the panther or Hound of the Baskervilles or Griffin Dunne whatever it is that supposedly prowls the moors.

I heard something neat once, that apparently people in history have reported visions of things just before they came into common usage — men with balloons or in flying machines, just before the dirigible and the airplane. Men-men, not little green men. So the current–

Sweet Pete! I’m still talking about this rubbish!

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X marks SOMEthing.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005 , 1:22 AM

As I walked along the east end of Princes Street today, a man passed me, walking in the other direction. He wore a tattered yellow coat, his grey hair was dirty and ruffled, and he had several days’ worth of salt-and-pepper stubble on his face. He spoke to himself, and the one bit I heard was, “Now they’re all going to know that I’m an ex-murderer!”

That’s a neat trick — the ex-murderer part, not the talking to onesself.

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p>What I love is when people sing to themselves while walking; it makes me happy, and I wish I was unselfconscious enough to do it. Imagine how different an everyday sidewalk scene would look if everyone was singing a different song and listening in to each other’s.

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Thematic Unity
Sunday, January 30, 2005 , 5:39 PM

I have a wee theory I call “Thematic Unity”. It’s a principle that I rely on, namely that the patterns in my life are interconnected. I don’t have to understand why or how, or be able to explain it, it just works this way. So I’m learning to use it.

Case in point: a friend told me about an anthology of Scottish speculative fiction being published this August, and they’re accepting submissions of work. It’s to showcase authors from or living in Scotland who write science fiction, horror, fantasy, or (wait for it) magical realism. When I read that last bit, I thought, “Hmm.” I’ve been creatively stalled for a bit because in my attempt to write short stories for submission, I kept trying to second-guess what publications would want. And the publications I knew about produce work that — well, I don’t like. There’s this literary fad that holds anything ugly or gritty as “realistic”. The drearier, the more pointless, the better. So I had no idea what to write for such publications. Norman Mailer said something on a very similar topic: “Writing a bestseller with conscious intent to do so is a state of mind that is not without comparison to the act of marrying for money only to discover the absence of love more onerous than anticipated.”

I related this to Noah last weekend, and he said something brilliantly simple: “Why don’t you just write for fun, for yourself?” Ding!

Then this anthology came along. It hits both points: I can write exactly my favourite type of story, and make up something that’s exactly what I want to write about. I went to bed last night intending to start work on it today. I said a little prayer of my own sort: “Okay, Universe, gimme something to work with.” (This is similar to my “Universe, send me a bag of money, as long as no one has to die” — which also works. Happily, I haven’t had to use that one for a long time.)

I’d bought antihistamines to deal with a recent bout of sneezing, scratching my eyes, and blowing my nose every night and morning when I was trying to sleep, and — they worked! Last night I had an enormous sleep like I’d managed to swim across an entire lake of cool, clean water. I dreamt about visiting creative friends in their studios. In one of the studios, I put on a hat full of sand from a playground sandbox. Sand fell all over the place when I took the hat off, but it was the stuff of play, so I was happy.

I woke up with an idea: An insurance salesman at the end of the world.

I got myself cleaned up and walked in the sun through the tenement streets to the cobbled Royal Mile, and into the grey stone crown of St Giles Cathedral. Sheila joined me shortly after, and the service began.

They do good theatre at St Giles. Huge beams of sun angle down through the stained glass windows, sweeping gradually through the congregation as the service goes on, as if enumerating us. The choir sang great, open chords. I knew the hymns this week, and sang them out loud. I like my singing voice.

I don’t know if it’s because this is what I’ve learned to associate with these thoughts, or if there’s something fundamental about certain sights and sounds that they have an effect on a human being, but the whole thing was just so… uplifting. The minister’s sermon again this week was poundingly topical, then segued into a nice point about the role of religion in life, namely that it should be in the realm of mystery, not concerned with explaining itself to common sense. It’s a matter of belief. But when belief is too thin, the minister said, as in present-day America, people are too ready to accept everything. When it’s too thick, as in Europe, people aren’t willing to accept anything.

But this was the really neat bit: The first thing he said in his sermon is that this taking of the word “apocalypse” to mean “the end of the world” is a misunderstanding. The Greek word from which it comes actually means “revelation”. Thank you, Universe. (In his prayer, the minister also thanked the creative people of the world who use comedy to help us laugh and see the familiar in new ways. Not just Thematic Unity, but some stage direction. Okay.)

Sheila and I went for lunch to The Elephant House, where I set up a blog for her using one of the computers there, then we parted company and I came here to a coffee shop near the new parliament, and spent the last few hours making notes about this story.

I’ve got it. There are still some missing bits, and I trust that they’ll get filled in because I’m tuned into this channel now. But I’ve got enough to feel excited. It’s not going to be one of those pieces I just get done in order to have something to submit; I’m going to have fun writing it.

The crowd in the coffee shop has thinned a bit. The two women sharing my table have left (one of them kept bumping the table as she nested in her seat, and the other had a hard Irish accent like a ball-peen hammer on my forehead). I don’t know why, but this place is also doing double-duty as a nursery. Everyone in here is either a student or a parent with a tiny child. One of the babies is Asian-looking, which elicits a mental question I can’t answer by looking at either parent. I guess this group tells me something about the demographic of the surrounding area, though I wouldn’t peg this part of town as residential. It’s the parliament, the BBC and The Scotsman offices, and out beyond, under the sky that’s growing pink as the sun sets, the crags of Arthur’s Seat. I suppose the russet and raw-grey concrete apartment buildings out the window to my right would count, except that I once saw an “Inspector Rebus” story where they used one of those buildings for the home of a dead junkie, so “family” isn’t the first thing to come to mind.

Still crazy after all these years.
Thursday, January 27, 2005 , 5:17 PM

I’m a clever guy, but when it comes to romantic relationships, I’m low-functioning, pretty much retarded.

I’ve been getting lots of good advice from friends, and really appreciating their wisdom. (Funny, this good material has nearly all been from women.) It was just pointed out to me that a long-distance relationship is a great structure for making you own and deal with your shit — because the other person isn’t even there! (Thank you, Lisa, for that one.)

I nearly made a terrible mistake this week. Or, rather, I did make it by sending some of those e-mails that one should really never send, but I happened to do it with someone who’s a bit more patient and wise in these things. I’m so glad I get another shot at this, and that I didn’t scare him off with my insanity. It’s quite scary, the stuff you can infer on your own, completely fabricating something that has no basis in reality.

Dating has made me an angry person — all those guys who’ve gone away without an explanation or a care. I didn’t realize that I’ve been feeling this way and I’d really like to dig that toadstool out of my garden before it poisons someone nice. More correctly, it’s a matter of getting to the desire, the “What is it that I want here?”, and communicating that, rather than foisting all the fears that happen on top of it onto someone else. (Thanks, Wendy.) The anger is just good stuff that’s twisted in on itself. The trick is to get back to that. It’s scary, though. I’m not someone who’s easily frightened, but this stuff scares the bejeezus out of me.

Another piece of advice (thanks, Julain), was “In dating, whenever you feel like asking for reassurance… don’t — unless you ask it from yourself.” The doubt, as was pointed out, most often has little to do with the other person.

And the final word comes from Joni Mitchell (via Elspeth— thank you): “Be cool”. This is my mantra from here forward, difficult as it might be to achieve sometimes.

Aargh.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005 , 1:44 PM

Life is hard to do. I’m good at some of it, but rubbish at other bits.

Re-enchantment
Wednesday, January 19, 2005 , 11:34 PM

Tonight I saw a movie, Un Long Dimanche de Fiancailles, with Anita, Liz, and Geoff. Its director also created the movies Amelie and Delicatessen, so I was expecting a dose of wistful magical realism. This movie wasn’t quite that. It was visually beautiful, and certainly imaginative, but was a different sort of movie than that. This is good for the filmmaker, I suppose, because I was a bit concerned that it was just going to be Amelie again but set in a different era. There were a lot of characters, and I found myself thinking of my mom’s classic “Which ones are the good guys again?” I kept mixing up the different soldiers in the missing lover’s company. It didn’t help that the plot deliberately twisted people’s identities around a couple of times. Somehow, though, I wasn’t bothered. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude with its dozens of “Aurelio Buendia”s, I just stopped trying and went with it, hoping it would make sense in the end. And it did. There were a few points when I choked up slightly, but the film stopped just short of moving me fully. I’m not sure if those were missed notes or if the director deliberately steered away from anything that could be criticized for being overly sentimental — a charge I’m sure was levelled at Amelie.

The art direction in the film was stunning. The recreations of France in the early 1900s were such a visual feast. I love the beauty that decrepit and glorious old architecture have, and Europe has this in abundance. On the bus back from the cinema, I looked out the windows and found myself in that rapture again about the city I live in. Coming back here after Christmas, it was stripped away, and Edinburgh was just another city. It was like seeing a grandparent naked: too real, too vulnerable, and a bit repulsive even if you don’t want to find it so.

The fact that I’ve fallen in love with a Canadian has a lot to do with the change; I’m aware of this. Tonight, though, the two managed to co-exist somehow: I love this place, I love him, and somehow I’m going to work it out. God knows where the relationship will go, I don’t. That’s fine, and at the moment, I’m loving it all anyway.

The bus-driver stopped and told us we had to get out because the road was blocked by a fire-engine. Walking past, I saw an empty vehicle with its face smashed off, showing the metallic skull of its chassis and its wiry innards. Firemen stood around, having a post-emergency talk about something. I kept walking, passing under the yellow sodium lamps, past the whitewashed sweet shop that inspired the chocolate-witches in Idea in Stone, across the junction, then down the brick canyon of the Easter Road. Appropriately, the song “Sidewalk” played through my headphones, sung by Story of the Year — a boy yelling soulfully over guitars and drums about leaving “the streets we knew”.

So maybe the movie wasn’t magical realism, but it reminded me: life sure is.

Yeeouch!
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 , 1:35 PM

I owe é2,620.20 in taxes.

Goodbye savings. Goodbye tax-preparer, who tells me this two weeks before it’s due, even though I gave him a final run-down of my finances six months ago, and because he didn’t tell me I’d have to pay this year’s taxes in advance, in two payments. I plan to dissolve my business before I have to pay the second. My pay comes from outside the country, so it’s time to go offshore or something.

True, the rate of taxation for me as a self-employed person is quite low, around 10%. Having to pay it in a lump, though, really hurts.

I rejigged my finances last autumn, thanks to one of The Strategic Coach‘s clients, a man named David Bach, whose book The Automatic Millionaireoutlines some “financial literacy” basics that allow anyone to save money. It’s been immensely popular, keeping him on theNew York Times bestseller list for most of the year, and nabbing him several appearances on Oprah. The appeal is that this is finally something that normal (e.g. not-rich) people can do, and do it painlessly.

Using the strategies he outlines in the book, I managed to save 20% of everything I earned last quarter, without even trying. I’m very grateful to Past-Me for doing this, because the money in the bank exactly covers what I now owe.

What really sucks about this is that it means I have to bump up my savings to about 35 or 40% of my income — now that I’ve had this lesson about saving my tax money in advance drilled into my forehead. Ouch.

Something else to put on my list of things to do this year: sort out my relationship to money. At the moment, it’s pretty acrimonious: I hate money, and it hates me.

Mullaga-WOW!
Friday, January 14, 2005 , 1:07 PM

I made the best soup last night!

Hame’s Mullagatawny Soup
2 onions
4 carrots
1 parsnip
3 apples
2 teaspoons of curry powder
1 vegetable stock cube
olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 package of Quorn pieces (the chickeny ones)

I used my hand-blender’s chopper cup thingy to mulch the veg and fruit, dumped everything into my giant aluminum/aluminium pot, and boiled the hell out of it for about ten minutes. Then I used the blender in the hot soup to make it a nice, even consistency, and let it sit overnight.

I’m going back for another bowl.

Hamster, now in concentrate.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005 , 11:50 PM

I write an e-mail newsletter as one of my duties for work, and one of the topics I was assigned to write about this week was a Strategic Coach concept called “The 21-Day Habit”. (I’m pretty sure that’s trademarked. We trademark everything*.)

To have some integrity in writing these pieces, I’m adopting the habit of doing the exercises they outline. Like breathing, just because I’ve done it once doesn’t mean I don’t have to do it again.

The habit I’m changing right now is about concentration. Working with computers for the past seven years or so has helped me develop a logical, problem solving facility that I never had before. This is a good thing. The bad part of working with computers, though, is that they still take enough time to do things that it’s not enough for the machine to “multitask”, you have to do it, too — fixing supper while it downloads some tunes, checking e-mails every ten minutes in-between bouts of work, seeing if there’s any new software released since yesterday, getting an instant message while I’m reading five different web pages, and so on.

I’ve lost the ability to concentrate for long periods of time. My attention span is like a swallow’s.

So my 21-Day Habit over the next few weeks is to do one thing at a time, and not stop until it’s finished.

It’s amazing what an adjustment this is, not flitting away to tend to a half-dozen other things at the same time. But it feels good so far, really quite similar to the feeling of having exercised.

[*As an aside, we got smacked down by the Globe and Mail in their December 18, 2004 edition on Page R5 by a columnist who choked on the Strategic Coach neologisms in a newsletter he’d received from us. My editor and I laughed, having written the newsletter in question ourselves: Hey, it’s free publicity, and if we don’t come up with new names for our processes and trademark them, people steal our stuff. It’s gross, but they do it.]

If found, please return to…
Wednesday, January 05, 2005 , 9:57 PM

I’m lost.

Tonight I went to see the movie Garden State. It was the perfect movie to see because of its themes, yet it was the worst movie for me to see… because of its themes.

I thought it was going to be a quirky-cute romance movie, but it turned out to be a much subtler, much more authentic piece. It had some original laughs, but it made me cry more often — parent-stuff, love-stuff. It f*ed me up a bit, because it went right to the middle of all those things I’m thinking about and drove up what it all feels like, being so unsure, trying to resolve the past and make some sense of an infinite — yet ultimately finite — future. So in that sense, it was like being vivisected for a night’s entertainment. I wanted to cry a lot more than I did, but I went with Patrick, and I didn’t want to make his moviegoing experience be about me.

Since I’ve talked way too much about my romantic life on here lately (he says, passing out shots of insulin), let me veer away to talk about how it struck me-as-a-writer: I’m really liking these reminders that I’m getting lately, from I [Heart] Huckabees, the painfully awkward Napoleon Dynamite, and now this movie, that I really have all the material I’ll ever need already. When something is honest and heartfelt, it’s irresistable. No flash necessary.

This Europe thing; I’ve kinda embarrassed myself. About three weeks ago I was telling friends in Toronto that I’d found home, that it was Scotland. And, true, I do love this place, and I’ve loved traipsing around Europe the past couple of years. I’m not finished doing it, either. But there’s something about Europe, kind of like discovering I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Mann or living inside this picture frame of being a writer. Geez, I even drank absinthe at New Year’s. It’s all authentic, it’s all me — I can’t help loving what I love.

But I guess I like the standing apart bit.

Now I’m in Scotland, and I discover I’m really Canadian. I’m set apart again. It’s the romance of the other. Am I that transparent? I might as well wear a black trenchcoat and eyeliner.

By the same token that I like the old and foreign, I also try to make my work funny. I’m a new writer (by industry standards), so I feel the urge to put in some wow, for fear that the little stuff won’t be enough, like I’ve got to inflate it to be noticed. I guess I do the same thing in life.

And now I’m in love, so I’m more in love than anyone has ever been. I’m following my heart around like it’s a drunken tango partner who’s about to pass out.

But it’s all real. When I’m feeling this stuff and writing about it, I mean it. And I guess this movie tonight shows that maybe this is what we’re hungry for, hearing others talk about what really means something to them. Lord knows we consume enough plastic sentiment and manufactured excitment for it to be a contrast.

My creative urge comes from wanting to fully experience my inside and outside worlds, and I suppose this urge for the other has proven to be a good way to keep shaking things up. It’s embarrassing in a world that thinks consistency equals maturity. Then again, that same world is full of messages saying to jump in, do it, live life to the full — while somehow still paying all of your bills.

I like what Joseph Campbell says on this:
Most people think that the thing we are looking for in life is meaning. I donét think thatés it at all. I think that people are looking for an experience which connects them to the ecstasy of what it could feel like to be totally alive. To know the unburdened state of total aliveness is the pinnacle of the human potential.

My editor and I had a good talk yesterday. One of the things we talked about, and agreed on, is that flaky people bug us. Of course, you know what that means: we’re scared of how flaky we might be if we didn’t keep it in check. Maybe it’s time to willingly lose that battle.

Nothing worse than a writer deconstructing himself. It’s nigh-on time to produce something, but I’ve been too busy with events in my own life. My tools are also in a mess: I broke one Pocket PC over the holidays, impulsively ordered another, and when it showed up today it quickly developed a fault. So now the first one is probably going to be back from repair before the new one gets picked up and returned. I’m out money, I can’t leave the house (it’s damned hard to work here), and I’m feeling dumb about it. I’m in one of those “bleeding money” phases, and some cauterizing has to happen soon.

P.S. Pic
Saturday, January 01, 2005 , 2:05 PM
An important bit of the story I forgot to mention, which explains why I’m babbling afresh about Noah weeks after I left Toronto: his family lives in Nova Scotia, and when he visited them for the holidays, he took time away from them (they were kind and released him for a day) and visited me on Prince Edward Island. Of course, my family loved him, and the whole thing between us stepped up to another level of reality.

My experience with dating has usually gone one of two ways: the first is summed up by the title of a book that was all the rage with the young women at The Coach:He’s Just Not That Into You. I’m a creative person who likes to express himself, so I get all tangled up when I have to stifle myself for fear of being scary, or when I gradually realise that I’m doing all the work ’cause the other guy isn’t really interested.

The other way it normally goes is that I realise I’m just not that into him. This hurts just as much, because I feel responsible for the other guy. I know I’m not, but I feel that way anyway. So it’s dreadful when that doubt creeps in, popping up when he’s not around and I think about him, or worse, when he’s right in front of me.

The situation I’m in is completely new to me: from the get-go, I feel sure, and this beautiful new person is not only giving me complete freedom to say whatever I need to, he’s expressing his feelings in the most incredible, moving way. It’s so damned simple.

So, yes, the visit was great. There was lots of excitement about whether the visit would happen because of one blizzard when he was leaving Toronto and a second when he was on his way to PEI. I’d already been having a nice, gentle time lazing around, appreciating my family, but the way they accepted him and us together was a dream. There was no attempt to pretend Noah was just a friend, or to shield my nephew from seeing what was going on. Admittedly, the one bit that made it a bit weird was that we’d only known each other for about two days and he was being introduced in such an official way. Yet it felt right. And getting to see each other one more time before I left the country was good for both of us, because it confirmed everything we’d been thinking and feeling and writing to each other about.

A little voice in my head just said Maybe you shouldn’t talk about all this. If it doesn’t work out, this poetic talk about destiny and all will look foolish. Screw that: this is way more interesting.

So now, I’m back in my Edinburgh flat, a 24-hour series of airplanes and airports and one Hogmanay party later (fireworks from the castle for yet another season and reason). I swear, when I first unlocked the door and stepped in with my giant duffel bag, I was startled that the flat had different dimensions than I remembered. This whole place seems completely alien after my trip to Canada, which was stuffed so full of activity. Already though, my friends here and I started hatching plans for things to do this year that I’m excited about.

Eeew, the wind is blowing rain against my windows. It’s not a snowstorm, but it’s more of this weather stuff.

Flying back to Edinburgh like a raven or a dove.
, 5:41 AM

The earth has changed because of a flood. My world has changed because of a Noah.

Love seems glib, superior, and arrogant when expressed to others. I couldn’t help myself, though: tonight at Liz’s Hogmanay party; I had to tell my friends about a vacation that turned into something more. I felt a twinge of guilt talking to one friend who’s wondering where his piece of romance pie is, and another who’s been wrestling for years with one of those love-angels who’s tangled and non-committal; everywhere he touches her, something slips out of joint. It’s just my time now; one day it will be their time, too. But it’s an arsehole thing to say when your face is beaming like a Buddha’s and you move by dog-paddling through the air.

I love my friends here, but can’t help but see the place as something I’m visiting. I feel so sure of Noah, something I haven’t been able to say for a long time. My policy is generally not to write about these things here, for fear that someone else will be hurt or worried by it, but the fact is that I have without a doubt found my paramour, my Platonic other half. All the complications and hurt of my past are erased in the face of the new possibilities he brings. I can’t hide it, and don’t want to. I followed my soul over here to Scotland; I knew this was where I was meant to be. But looking at Noah, I knew that he is where I’m meant to be. That may well mean a return to Canada. Today, my post-war tenement with its leafy, rubbishy, fag-endy staircase was no longer romantic, but something that kept me away from the person I love.

If there is, in fact, to be an end to my time spent living in Europe, I want to go out with a bang. I never did a “Grand Tour” on finishing grade school, and now it occurs to me that that’s what these five years will be, getting my UK/European passport like getting a degree of sorts.

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p>It’s all crazy speculation at this point. But there are some things in life you just know, and this is one of them. Sometimes in life you have the opportunity to choose your future. This is one of them for me.

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