ALWAYS BE PREPARED

The Montreal drive road kit (in no particular order):

Velvet Underground, Peel Slowly and See, disc 3

Various artists, Café Del Mar, Volume Seis

Schubert, String Quintet in C Major, Trio in B Flat Major, Ensemble Villa Musica

Malcom McLaren, Paris

Various artists, Modern Starts, a MOMA compilation

Soundgarden, Down on the Upside

Steve Reich, Triple Quartet

Miles Davis, Complete In A Silent Way Sessions, Disc 3

Kip Hanrahan, All Roads Are Made of the Flesh

Various artists, Red Hot on Impulse

Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Global A Go-Go

David Parsons, Ngaio Gamelan

Frank Sinatra, A Swingin’ Affair

Miles Davis, The Complete Bitches Brew Session, Disc 4

Terry Riley, Descending Moonshine Dervishes

Brian Eno & David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Lou Reed, Ecstasy

John Cale and Terry Riley, Church of Anthrax

Various artists, Pottery Barn’s Hip Holidays, Vol 2

Rheostatics, Music Inspired by the Group of Seven

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COLD METAL

This is how my friend P spends his days; he folds sheet metal into furniture and assembles hunks of industrial junk into ray guns. Calgary-based readers will almost certainly have by now attended his recent show of furniture and rayguns in the Artspace Gallery in the old converted meat plant in Ramsay. He loves me well, and if you were to inspect my buttocks, you might note that they have been shaped by one of his couches, upon which I sit nightly. He’s in Montreal this weekend, and ergo so will I be.

Killer, sadly, will not be with us, since she has some rather pressing translations to perform. The onslaught of French is endless, apparently, and every one of those words needs to be translated in English. This is particularly disturbing since Ottawa, Montreal and everything in between is currently engulfed in ice-storm-like conditions. Now, Killer drives like all those guys in Ronin, so for her a drive through an ice storm is like you walking to the fridge. Me? Not so much. Killer is unflinchingly aggressive when behind the wheel, and I’m not just being glib. I mean she actually does not flinch. And she will not give ground to man, beast or nature when she’s on the road. I’ve been in many near misses with her when some asshole pulls in front of us on an icy street or whatever, and while I’m recoiling, screaming, clenching my rectum, she just drives on with what you could not even call a poker face, because poker face suggests some kind of effort being made to keep the face still, where Killer, even when approaching a crash, is clearly not making an effort. The only emotion you can see, and I have only had split-second glimpses of it, is deep in her eyes, and her eyes, in those moments, say to the asshole down upon whom she is now bearing at high speed in our scratchless late-model dark sleek sedan, they say, “I am the agent of your enlightenment today, for I shall scare you out of ever cutting anyone off again.” She doesn’t slow down, she doesn’t swerve and inevitably the asshole gets out of the way fast at the last second and she doesn’t even grin. She just keeps driving.

One day I’ll tell you about the time she almost beat a guy up when he mouthed off her driving from his mini-van.

Anyway, I gotta drive myself and my friend M, who is returning home. He is my brother’s tenant and a well-known soup-off judge, among other things. M and I are gonna slide on in to Montreal tomorrow afternoon or early evening, just in time to see the Bali slide show my brother has prepared us. Then I’m gonna hang with P.

Last night, incidentally, I heard from the television that Montreal has the greatest snowfall of any major city on Earth.

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THE MOLE

The mole makes four surprising appearances in recent popular culture:

1) “Situation X out of control/My eyes are open like a mole/who smiles/going wild” - Lou Reed, from Ecstasy, his last album.

2) “A mole/digging in a hole/digging up my soul/now going down/excavation” - U2, from All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

3) The Mole, a not-very-well-liked “reality” tv show.

4) In this very blog, the charred marble of a mole that my doctor burned with liquid nitrogen yesterday and told me would just fall off sometime. True to her word, it did, rolling out of my sleeve and on to the table at a business meeting today. And on to the floor. And then my poor charred mole, it rolled right out the door.

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UNDERSTANDING IS A KIND OF ECSTASY

Carl Sagan said that; understanding is a kind of ecstasy. One of the truly great things about gettin’ older is that you actually do get smarter, at least if you consider pattern recognition to be a form of intelligence. You have your mighty brain up in there, just daily smoldering away, recording everything and submitting it for analysis, and the longer it’s around the more stuff you’ve processed with it and the more the patterns emerge. Every day you’re walking around and studying. You see the shapes of leaves, the colors of paint, the different uses of textiles, the way the dirt eddies in the gutters, the fractal motions of the clouds. You study the effects of gravity, of love, of light, of art, of physics as you watch and listen to and smell and feel everything and everyone around you rise and fall like the tides. You really can see the universe in a grain of sand, or in the spiral shape at the heart of a daisy, or in the way some kid on the bus arranges his schoolbag at his feet. Maybe it’s why I like mathematics, because it’s the purest, most poetic reduction of our attempts to understand the patterns that govern everything we see. It’s what Einstein thought was God. Not that the patterns are proof of a higher being, but that the patterns are the higher being. And we’re in them and they’re in us. And okay, so I don’t really like mathematics at all, but I like anything that kinda dances around mathematics without actually getting too complicated. It’s why we love music; because rhythm is time divided by noise. And when we understand the pattern, when we feel it, it fills us with joy.

It wasn’t skin cancer. I was sure it wouldn’t be. But it was big and ugly and in the three days since it got all sore and red I paid so much attention to it that eventually I couldn’t even say with any certainty whether it had always been there, as I first thought, or whether it mightn’t be brand new. Not on my collarbone, but back a bit, on one of the tendons that you can make stand out on your neck if you clench your mouth down in a frown. It wasn’t cancerous. My doctor bathed it in liquid nitrogen with a big q-tip. I heard sizzling.

“Is that sizzling?” I asked.

“It’s kind of a Steven Spielberg sound,” she replied by way of affirmation.

* * *

DOPPELGANGER 2.0

Is the doppelganger a symbol of my struggle to maintain a sense of individuality while I sink deeper and deeper into a completely stereotypical life? Is the doppelganger a manifestation of my fears that I am just another “cool” bald guy with clunky glasses and a blog?

No. The doppelganger is real! This morning I saw him again, and this time Killer was my witness. She was driving me to work. He was walking. Smugly. As if to show off his superior determination. His fitness. His stick-to-it-iveness. Me, I slept in and needed a ride. Too much champagne after my Calgary Stampeders crushed the pathetic, tiny Winnipeg team. The doppelganger does not drink champagne. I yelled at Killer, in classic late-show Hitchcock style, “Oh my god! There he is! The Doppelganger!” He stood at the corner and we passed, making a left-hand turn. Our eyes met, mine and the doppelgangers. I think he saw my fear. I saw confusion. He was pretending not to look at the guy in the car who looks just like him.

And then I saw his tie. Chartreuse, silky, no pattern; just a plain flash of intense color. Pantone 390 or so.

I have that tie.

Seriously.

* * *

MOULDY FIG

Jazz term. A mouldy fig (or, for our American readers, a moldy fig) is a fellow who listens to and enjoys pre-bop jazz. Dixieland. Someone who’s not hip to the bop, you know? You can extend it to mean someone who’s just not up on whatever is happening now. You know, “I’d send my dad the pictures, but that mouldy fig doesn’t even have e-mail.” Or maybe, “Call me a mouldy fig, but I prefer reading magazines to reading your goddam blog.”

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