travel

It seems I've lost my blog-head. I miss it.

For years that's how I walked around, my brain full of intros and outros; thinking of a phrase that really needed to be written down; the words I might use in a vain attempt to make you see what I was seeing.

That doesn't happen any more, for whatever reason. I think it started with wanting to keep my love life more private than I had. I think the novel last November finished it. I've been pulled more to fiction and longer pieces, and lord knows I've got a limited amount of time and/or energy for writing.

At any rate, that in part explains why I went to Winnipeg and came back without posting even once. I thought about it, but in that way where you think you should want to do something, not because you're bursting to do it.

But Winnipeg, yes.

I went out there for a long overdue visit to Chris, who I befriended a few weeks into library school and was the only thing that made my life in Halifax bearable - until we added Grace and Greg and Daniel to our twosome and we all got each other through the special kind of hell that is an MLIS.

Right, Winnipeg.

If you stand in one spot in Chris' hall you can see both the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. The Assiniboine is wide and leads you straight east into the sunrise. The Red is a snake's curve through the elms way off in the distance.

They've got a swank pad, her and her man, with two balconies and lots of natural light. I had my own room and woke up to that sunrise every morning, though only enough to think "I should get up and watch that from the balcon-"

We took the bus; we walked. I saw several local characters - Fast Freddy, former shoplifter and pool shark, who takes good care of his shoes - Someone Low, a strange writer-type man with a knack for saying just the wrong thing - Eric Pyle, about whom Chris' man said "Some indie rockers develop job skills when they realize they're not going to make it. And then there's Eric Pile." - and then an Ex who shall not be named, but about whom I'd heard a lot and was more famous to me than all those other people combined.

There was art, a movie, diners, bridges. The Nonsuch at the Manitoba Museum brought on the vertigo I hadn't felt in months. Chris swears up and down it was moored solid, but my inner ear saw fit to inform me otherwise.

There was sitting and reading and talking and talking. We fell easily back into step - we always do, after the first hour or so of disorientation.

Standing at the bus stop early Sunday morning, waiting for the 20 Academy to take me to the airport, we talked some more. Chris told me about flying business class - for cheap - from DC to Chicago.

"It was so nice," she said. "All this room, and food. The man beside me was pretty grumpy. But I didn't care, because I had a beautiful fruit plate."

I started laughing, hard. And crying a little too, a little wet around the lashes.

"I don't know why, but that sentence encapsulates everything I love about you."

She hooted and threw her arms around me. We hugged tight and kept laughing.

I got home from London last night. I'd call it the boring London except that it seems a bit like magic-land to me.

It's a place where I don't have to work; where I nap; good food is abundant; the wine flows freely; where my body and psyche get blurry from physical and emotional satiation.

It might be nice to go back in the summer sometime, since on my two trips so far, it's been cold enough that we haven't done a ton of wandering and sitting outside. I just follow, and with my poor sense of direction my sense of the city is the same.

Though this trip wasn't icy cold like the last one, so we wandered to Wortley, had a cider, grabbed a coffee to go. We looked at the river near the brewery. We ate a couple of really good dinners. I drank more wine than I had in the past 4 weeks combined. We ate salmon with the Daubs and their three dogs; the pope sat at my feet as I picked the stuff I liked out of the salad bowl for dessert. People dropped by for visits at the Grad Club. We were the old people at CTO pointing out the names of Canadian bands almost popular 10 years ago until I stopped for a few minutes to dance to the Cure. We were the only people not working at Moon Over Marin and a third of the audience at the Richmond Tavern. We ate lunch with my first love. We watched crappy TV and ate snacks in bed. We kissed and grabbed and looked and cuddled and stroked and fucked and laughed.

And talked. Ohhhh and we talked. Desultory hungry conversation before the eggs came, confidences too loud after the bar. The ebb and flow over sidewalks and rivers and pints.

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.

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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.