travel

Atlanta never stood a chance with me.

A weekend in New York, then the rest of the week off to bum around home, then one day back at work and then, 1 day, 3 airports, and 8 travel hours later, skip skip stop cruise to the gate in Atlanta.

Only maybe just a tiny sliver of a smidgen of a chance.

It was cold there. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect it to be warm, per se, I'm not an idiot, I checked the Weather Underground, but the WU didn't tell me how bitey the wind would be. Or how the February sun lacks warmth in Georgia too. I didn't expect the meeting rooms at the W Hotel to be nearly air conditioned. I didn't expect I would be so busy trying to learn and keep up with work I wouldn't make it outside till 5 pm.

Maybe the sun was warm at 2.

I was tired. From being out of my routine and this the third one I was trying to make (let's count: the laze, fuck, rest, walk of New York; the loll and putter of days off at home; the schmancy elegance of my ersatz boutique hotel). I was worn out a bit emotionally from the pendulum swing of New York intensity to my empty house and bed. I just couldn't get it up to explore Atlanta alone.

Maybe Atlanta's a great town. Maybe if I had had it in me to walk far enough. Maybe if I'd wandered aimless. Maybe if I'd cared enough to do anything other than the easiest thing. So I ate at the same restaurant 4 days in a row because I could sit at the bar and eat buttery winter greens and drink a delicious local oatmeal stout. I didn't wander out of my business area neighbourhood because nothing I could find online or in the paper seemed worth the effort.

Strangely, though I didn't love being there, I did love taking photos of it. Its streets and tall buildings make beautiful angles; its surfaces are stone and reflective. Randomly, it seemed.

It's hard to say what the best part of the trip was. It was a blur, a lot of it. People, buildings, people, sun, the food, shadows, beer, wine, the faint smell of gas in our apartment. We stayed on the Upper East Side - a bit tonier in some ways, a bit rougher in others, than the East Village or Brooklyn's Park Slope, the neighbourhoods I've stayed in before.

We walked. We walked and walked. We walked so much my shin seized up and I was limping.

We saw the Met by mistake, we walked the MoMA till our eyes were too full of beautiful things to take in any more.

We cut through a glinting Central Park, blanketed with snow under a blazing sun. A warm spring sun. I tried to wash the taste of the worst breakfast ever out of my mouth with swigs of the worst tea-like substance ever bottled. I bought a smoothie to wash that away. We left the tea chilling in a snow bank near the building where John Lennon was shot, where Yoko Ono lives.

Seeing Yoko Ono perform Monday night - the eve of her 77th birthday - was surely one of the highlights.

She is bananas.

Not in the ululating way, which I far prefer to the lyrics she was singing. The first couple of songs I sat there, listening to what she was singing with my arms and legs folded up as many times as I could make them. I knew my body language was parlaying the fact that the lyrics were making me want to tear something up into tiny little bits. I could feel D.Jack noticing, and I kept trying to unwind my limbs and facial muscles so that at least one of us could have a good time without worrying that the other one wasn't.

But then finally, finally, the music took over. She ululated more and spoke less and the tension I had eased out of my body stayed out. And then Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon came on stage and they played skronky guitar while Yoko wailed about mulberries. And I loved it with everything.

We drank a bottle of really good wine while eating tender noodles. We drank bubbly wine after. We walked up and down Broadway looking for J. And lo, I am here to give you these two tips:

1. there is no 1087 Broadway in Manhattan
2. always check what borough you're supposed to be in, since, maybe, perhaps, there is a club playing raucous riot grrrl covers in the deep depths of Brooklyn instead of pigeons cooing in the park that should rightfully be where the music is

We were tired a lot of the time, tried to fit in naps, or at least rests every day. I always forget how tiring it is just to see things. To soak up the reflection of all the light reflecting off all those buildings, the new faces, tones, voices, the cars, the honking, the honking. How the sheer masses of people in New York, particularly, make my head swim and my brain use up glucose faster than I can produce it.

The problem with stopping for a moment is that you realize how goddamn tired you are.

Possibly too tired to mop the floor.

I'm off to New York City tomorrow, another weekend date with D.Jack. We've been sort of planning this since, I dunno, November maybe?, and for serious planning it for a month.

But only about 15 minutes ago, when I was sweeping up the dirt from sweeping in preparation for mopping, bent down industriously trying to get the last bit of remaindirt, did I think "Holy fuck. This time tomorrow I'll be with D.Jack. In New York."

My body thrilled, a little tremble all through it.

But right now, I'm tired. I've spent the evening cleaning and packing, getting ready to come home to a clean house, which is something I love to do, even if it tires me out to rush it all in at the end because I inevitably fuck around and leave 80% of what I need to do till the night before.

I will interrupt this post to sing the praises of my iPhone. I got one a few weeks ago, after about two months of blithering about it. And pretty much immediately fell in love with it. After price, my main resistance was that I thought it might be more hype than anything else. It's not. It's a beautiful piece of machinery, beautifully and thoughtfully designed.

It is, as Steve pointed out, a bit heavy and bulky for a phone. It is, as I pointed out in return, very very small for a computer.

Which leads me back into the post. I think that I am not going to take my computer to New York.

Now, there are some of you out there that are gasping in shock at such a heretical though. There are others of you who don't understand why I would consider bringing it in the first place. Suffice it to say that I cannot remember the last time I went somewhere for more that 24 hours without bringing my computer with me.

I would say we had a symbiotic relationship except the computer would do fine without me.

The tug of anxiety that I'm feeling about leaving it behind - but what if? what if? - is actually the deciding factor.

Time to cut the cord there.

Or at least transfer it over to a smaller machine.

My problem is that I am long winded. Writing a short blog post is hard for me, and feels a bit unsatisfying. Because also my problem is that I like details. I live for details. I live through them. Details take a long time to write down.

Let's just say that this weekend, I managed not to get so drunk I had to lie down on my kitchen floor in the middle of a date. Let's say that I loved sharing a bag of popcorn with J. and giggling through Julie and Julia. Shall we say that I loved too a green-whipped ride along Scott Street one way and then the other, with Mars having risen higher between them. Let us dwell for a moment on the look of pleased surprise on D.Jack's face when I made myself an Unexpected Megan.

Let's say that I had a great time in Kingston at a wonderful brilliant art show. Let us add that I loved drinking beer outside as part of a faggot sidewalk party. Let us commend the homophobe Kingstoners who shouted that at us for their obviously perceptive nature.

To paraphrase -
Meghan: Do you think you have a thing for musicians?
Megan: I've dated about 3 non-musicians since I was 16.

Maybe too let's say that I tried very hard not to be a pill about my travelling arrangements, but that I only half succeeded. We'll say that I learned a few things about how I need to travel if I'm going to a place where the trains and buses run infrequently out of a station that is inexplicably way the fuck up Chebucto. Let us repeat these four words: Chill The Fuck Out.

Let us also ponder Mae's loveliness, the Mae who said "Okay, you should take the train because we probably won't leave for noon and then you'll be stressed and we'll be rushing. And this way you don't have to make small talk."

Finally, let us say that there are beautiful things, and here is a morning that is a string of them: waking up in a gigantor bed with your best friend, with the craziest bedhead after spending a muggy night tossing and turning. Being in a house with a perfect circle iron grate in the upstairs floor that you can press your eye against to spy on the main floor. Making coffee and eating breakfast with special-bought soy milk and more friendly friends and a nice dog and a cat you buried your face in deliciously even though doing so made you sneeze three times. And let us say that the coffee was good coffee and that the windows were opened onto the densely-leaved backyard.

And we will say that string is sparkling.

One of the nice things I have to say about Stouffville is that is smells wonderful. Green and light yellow and water. A grey brown smell coming up from the deck now, too, under the midday sun.

Maybe it doesn't smell like this all the way through the town, but my mom's house backs onto the resevoir. The world is a place full of wonders, that I can be sitting outside, listening to the red-wing blackbirds and watching a big shaggy lab chase the swans back onto the pond at the same time I am blogging you.

Odd that my spring of travel ends here, in a boring ex-farm town starting to get swallowed up by Toronto. Though maybe boring is harsh now, 15 years after high school. If I moved here now, I might find it fine.

No. That's not true.

I don't really understand small towns. The city, yes of course, I was an urbanite long before I got to live urbanely. And the country, too, I understand forest and fields, I miss them, very much, having grown up kind of in the country and most definitely in the middle of both of those things. I consider myself lucky that when we were turned loose to play in the summer, it was in the Vivian Forest, and with an adult's hindsight, can't fathom all those hours complaining by Karen's pool that there was nothing to do. Nothing to do? She lived two blocks away, literally, from hectare upon hectare of regional forest. We wasted it.

But small towns? The disadvantages of the city - lots of people, traffic, close neighbours; the disadvantages of the country - not that much going on, a lack of community options, a tendency to small-mindedness. Not for me.

That may just be left over from growing up in one, hard to say, but I almost always want to get out as soon as I get in.

++

As a side note: re-reading the entries of the last little while over, it seems I've lost my sense of humour. Not feeling the funny these days. It'll come back soon, I promise, and I'll start being more entertaining.

The story I'm getting is that the jet lag wears off after a couple of days. That's tomorrow for me. Maybe I'll write you something sensible then. Right now, I got nothing.

Except pictures!

I kept myself awake last night by uploading all my photos to flickr. Please to enjoy:

Present Megan is thrilled that Past Megan somehow knew that Future Megan would be deliriously happy to come home to clean sheets on the bed.

Though the delirium may just be jet lag. Both my body and brain have been feeling woozy for the last two hours, but I've been making myself stay up.

My laundry is done, my photos are sorted. I've unpacked, though a third of it is strewn about on various flat surfaces.

Tonight, I'm just leaving it all where it landed, figuring I'll have more energy for that at 6 am tomorrow.

I am having a very hard time letting go of these boots. Even though I wore them here with the express purpose of replacing them and leaving them behind. The soles are worn down badly, the insides are torn to hell, and there's a 1 inch gap in the back seam of the left one.

But oh, when I put them on, it's like putting on a second foot. I pull the laces and my feet sigh and relax.

They've taken me all around the town, in many many towns. Ottawa, of course, but Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, San Francisco, Davis, Chicago, New Orleans, Portland, Berlin and Dublin. Saggart, Rathcoole, Wolfville, Green Bay, Lunenburg, Stouffville, Ballantrae, all those stops along the 7.

There is a lot of ground ground into these boots. Memories counted in silica grains.

I've been wearing this style of boots for years now, since living in Halifax, I think, or maybe the year after, so nigh on a decade. Each time I wore a pair of them past repair, I'd think -maybe it's time for a change and so I'd look around for a reasonable replacement and then I wouldn't find one and I'd buy another pair of these.

Somewhere in the last two and a half or three years, Fluevog decided to stop making them. It's more painful than it should be. They're just boots. Again this time, I can't find a decent replacement. Everything is too plain, not plain enough, too high, too low, too this too that, Not These Boots.

But I can't get these boots anymore. CT and I were all over eBay and other corners of the internet looking for an extra pair. To no avail.

Oh, my beloved black boots, you've served me well. You've been kind and faithful companions through all kinds of mistreatment and crazy conditions and not one shine in your long long life.

May your afterlife in an Irish landfill be sweet.

Bloody fucking hell. Ireland has stumped me, yet again.

This last time, it was the wake up call. Did I just set it? I followed the written instructions, but there was no gentle electronic voice prompting me to enter my time, or reassuring me that it was set. Just an empty line, then three quick tones. Do I call back? According to the written instructions, this may cancel my wake up call, if indeed it is set, and it seems unlikely anyone - electronic or real - would inform me that it had been.*

This all started with the windows in the hostel.

In Berlin, we were fine. The three of us shared a huge apartment - the living room itself the size of my main floor at home. Everything was intuitively well-designed, in good working order and beautiful.

The hostel in Dublin was a come down. First off, it was about the same price for the two of us as our quiet giant apartment in our beautiful bustling Berlin neighbourhood. Second, it was loud in the lobby, a busy throughfare without much room for people, never mind their suitcases. It was okay, but worn and loud and ugly. There was no lift. We carried our suitcases up to the 3rd (North American 4th) floor.

Okay, fine. It would be fine. We had a twin room with a private bathroom. I was envisioning the room CT and I had shared in San Fran. Clean, roomy, quaint.

The door swung open and nearly clanged into the child-sized metal bunkbeds (though these were more comfortable and better assembled than my last encounter with such beds). The room wasn't wide enough to have put another set of bunk beds in, and only had about 4 feet at the end of the bunk beds before the bathroom. Which was kind of dirty and contained the stinkiest perfumey towels ever.

We needed to open the windows wider. Much, much wider. We looked up.

Being on the top floor, the height was the only big thing about the room. There was a pole with a hook on the end to louver the windows open and shut. Shelley got one of them pulled wide open and we drank in the fresh air, the rain spitting blessedly down on our faces.

Wanting to have a nap, she started on the roller blinds all curled up quiet at the top of each window. Hook, pull, dark, snap, bright. Over and over. And that was on the blind with the loop. The other, we quickly realized, had no hook at all, just screws marking where the hook once waited.

Even so.

They were so poorly designed that even when you had the blind pulled down, the hook in the loop was in the way of you snicking the blind into place. We both tried, each of us till our shoulders ached.

Shelley broke first, more tired that I was, and got the guy from the front desk. I lay on the floor and took pictures.

When he showed up, he didn't really talk to us, just set up the ladder. After he'd tried for 5 unsuccessful minutes with the pole.

Since then, it's been more of the same. The next morning, we couldn't get the shower to work. The woman from the desk came up to help us, chuffing a bit at our uselessness until it took her 5 minutes and both hands to twist it into working.

But okay, it's a hostel, old, perhaps not all that well cared for. We hoped for better at the luxury resort. And it's luxe, this resort, with a Rolls sitting outside the front doors, maybe for show, and a helicopter that is definitely not for show, but for transporting the wealthy British to their horse races.

Tired and overheated from the trip from Berlin, we walked into our new double room - that the glittery tongued young man behind the desk gave me as single in a fit of facial piercing solidarity - and dropped our bags. Though the sun streamed through the west facing window, late afternoon orange, the bathroom was pitch. I flipped the light.

Nothing.

I called reception. The switchboard operator didn't even switch me, said only, sounding bored, "Yuh put yer kay caird in te slaht."

"The key card? In the slot? Like on the door?"

"Nah, te slaht inseyde te dahr."

I hadn't seen any such slot, so we went back and forth a bit until I remembered that the first extra wide glowing switch-looking thing had a slit in it. I popped the key card in and and there was light.

We got settled, putzed around, internetted, reorganized. I gave Shelley a fashion show. We decided to watch some Irish TV. Still putzing, I tossed Shelley the remote. She pressed this button and that button, and nothing. I read her the instructions from the top of the TV. We got snow.

A knock on the door. Housekeeping with extra blankets.

"Oh good!" I said. "Thank you! While you're here.... we seem to be having trouble with the TV. Is there a trick to it?"

She stiffened. Rolled her eyes.

"Jesus. Christ."

Aye, well he didn't know te trick neither.

*UPDATE: It worked. If only because I was so nervous about it not ringing that I was awake 20 minutes before it actually rang.

It feels like years ago we were at the Gay Bingo. It was only Sunday night, but now we're in Saggart, which is way out in the country. We ate dinner, a very good dinner, in a town of 500 with one pub and one nice restaurant.

Sunday night, after a bento box, we got to The George, around 9.15. Shelley got us Guinness, which tastes the same in Dublin as in Ottawa, strangely and thankfully. I'd hate to have had Guinness ruined for me.

We talked about whether I could get away with the boy bartenders short hair, looked for the cute girls, and tried to figure out how to play Irish bingo. There are no letters across the top, so, I argued, it couldn't really be bingo at all, since there were 9 or 10 columns, not 5 and how were you supposed to know to shout bingo when you were looking at 9 or 10 columns of random numbers with no letters.

One boy got around that by shrieking like a toddler when he'd won. Except that he hadn't won, but he kept shrieking anyway.

The bar got more and more full, more and more drunk, louder too. By 11:30 we were done, it was too much. I'd been to the toilet once, and had to elbow my way through people who didn't want to let me pass once already and I was just ready to go home.

And neither of us had won.