Portrait of the Crusty in Repose

The dark purple stains of last night's red wine sit in the cracked dried flaps of the skin on his lips.

'Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Boring. Boring. Boring.' Repetition trips out of his mouth, little word crumbs that, if followed, might trace a path through the woods to a clearing marked 'Brain Damage, Lancashire'.

The sun beats down a steady 4/4 time. No bass.

He won't make eye contact. Instead, he retracts behind a wall of crumpled clothes and trying that little bit too hard not to care debonaire drunk asshole stare - the kind that fits at 21, looks pathetic at 45.

A few too many nights spent stumbling near the edge of the wide crevasse he let his dreams fall into, and so now he's bitter. He's pissed and sinking, snarling and flinching at the translucent midday shadow of empty bottles and drained desire. Smoking himself down to the filter and then, yellow fingered, flicking two at anyone who dares to not laugh at the strain of the joke he's performing. Goes like this:

Disintegrating Man - a self-aware and ironic statement, a rejection of bourgeois nicety and conformist living, a fuck you to good citizen, an acid gob in the eye of buttoned up Britain. A living protest punk circa 1976...

...but 33 years on in Britain, still pissed, it's a stretch - drum skin thin - to spin self-abuse and substance slavery as anti-establishment, as protest, as punk, when really the tune is passive flaccid mean old drunk.

But God and Shane McGowan bless 'im he'll keep trying.

The sun will keep 4/4 time, he'll keep the government in daily liquor tax, and flat on his back beneath the childrens' swings he'll spit and he'll snarl and he'll sing through the hole in his head that leads down, stinking, stained with red wine.

I'm ashamed to be half English*

After spending the morning not quite being able to take in the fact that my region will now be represented at the European level by a man who believes that The Holocaust was actually just a big fat porky pie made up by a bunch of Jew-loving bleeding heart lefties...(fuck. he really did get in.)...I signed into farcebook to discover that the burning issue at hand, according to one Manchester 'radical', is not the election of a right-wing fascist as a Member of European Parliament, but the fact that the anti-BNP Hope Not Hate campaign was set up by the Daily Mirror.

Let's take a look at this point by point:

1. Anyone capable of setting up and logging onto an online networking site is also capable of using Google...and a simple one page search will reveal that this 'hidden mastermind' of the HnH campaign has in fact been running it openly for three years. Ah - so the conspiracy theory begins to fray. [SFX: faint but persistant sound of a barrel being scraped]
   
2. Isn't it so much easier to rail against everything and everyone than to have to deal with differences while trying to keep your eye on the bigger goal? That's a leading question, sure. I'm no big Mirror fan, but even angry knee-jerk I can see that every time people with a common interest (like, um, not living in a fascist state) begin ripping each other apart for simple sport we. are. doomed.
   
3. The BNP may be simplistic racists, small minded bigots, and hatemongers, but they aren't stupid. They see an open door (cheers for that New Labour) and they walk through it. Easy. Everytime I hear someone laughing about their 21 year old crew cut councillors, I shudder. The punchline to the joke falls flat when they just keep getting elected.
   

So why bother writing this at all? Another pointless tirade, directed elsewhere, using up energy.

Well, the energy is there, crawling under my skin. I feel sick. I feel angry.

And I suppose writing here is part of my recent attempts to grow up a little and resist responding directly to inflammatory emails/listserv posts/hysterics posing as politically astute citizens.

For the next five years at least, it's pretty clear that we've got a much bigger problem on our hands than conspiracy theories and the vested interest of the Daily Mirror.

Anyway, dear readers...if tirades aren't your bag, you really should've learned by now to stay away.

____________________________________

Canadian translation section:

BNP = British National Party.............."rights for whites" etc...think Ralph Klein, worse, with an English accent

Daily Mirror = redtop tabloid paper. Sample headline: "Horny rhino falls in love with car"

Who is this guy she's talking about? = Nick Griffin, BNP leader, and now representative of the North West of England.

____________________________________


*quoted from Mancunian poet Mike Garry's poem of the same title. If I could remember or find the whole poem, I'd post it here. He's more eloquent than I with his rage.

Please be advised that your flight has been delayed

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!

I think this might push my travel time into the 24 hour bracket.

Just wanted to share that.

Oh, and the fact that I've just bought a Gregory Maguire book and crosswords to keep me company/from killing any one of the patrons or staff of Calgary International Airport.

I am calm. I am serene. I am taking lots of codeine.

There. This should be about enough to use up the last of my internet credit.

Happy trails, campers.

xxxxxxxx

Bonanza Jellybean and the BC/Northern Alberta Roadtrip

I now know that jelly beans actually make me feel ill, Kangol hats are big enough to fit my gargantuan head, and even when a large proportion of a friendship has been carried out via written correspondence, it really is good to sit at the same table sometimes.











- Mister Mott at the best cafe in E-town (have an excellent coffee, learn about the Russian Revolution, etc.)










I've also learned that Great Blue Herons are all of those things, as well as being paparazzi-friendly.







- paddling in English Bay, Vancouver











I've been reminded that some people stay alive in your heart and your mind no matter how long it's been...










(that's me and Gosia's feet in Horseshoe Bay, Vancouver....and YES I am wearing stirrup socks)












...and others just don't.

***

After almost booking ourselves into a hunter's cabin (complete with minimal furnishings and a chopping block of death to the rear), L, S and I threw ourselves at the mercy of google and, mercy me, it landed us west of Hinton in Old Entrance, former CN railway station, sleeping in a teepee on the banks of the Athabasca River.




















































































































Being three prairie girls, we know how to chop wood and start fires.












<-- tough ass L wielding her axe











Also, having grown up in a right-wing breeding ground, we sometimes expect to be met with something marked on the Silently Disapproving through to Outright Hatred scale.

It took me two days of slowly noting the abundance of butch women around the place before the penny finally dropped and I realised we were staying at a lesbian-run ranch...IN ALBERTA. (translation for those not listening: Texas of Canada. Not the greatest place to be gay.)

This information jarred somewhat with the catalogue of knowledge and personal experience I've amassed, but true it was, and it made this queer wannabe cowgirl so so full of joy.



















































































So, here's the real reason I cried all the way through Brokeback Mountain. I miss this land like a lost limb, grappling for it in the night when I'm half awake and remembering. Just three days in these mountains is enough to fill me to the brim.

Postcard from Beef Country

We are an hour and a half outside Edmonton, heading west on Highway 16, when we pull over to buy ice in a place that's only recently thawed.

RESTAURANT - LIQUOR - GAS shouts in meter high lettering, red, matched perfectly with the two loaded touring bikes parked to the right of the main door. The parking lot is packed with mud-caked trucks and semi cabs without loads, and in our city sedan we stick out like stillettos in snow.

We head inside and pass the door to the diner. Two tables of people pause their toast en route to mouths to note each new arrival while the occupants of table three couldn't be less interested. The smell of all-day coffee fills the air and provides a stewed and bitter backdrop to diesel, dirt and the slow burn of hot fat.

Down the hall, two bathroom stalls are flanked by a wall of hunter fame. Photos of men posing with dead animals (moose, deer, mountain lion) are jammed together in a photo montage of 'I was here, saw this beast, and shot it'. L tells me she doesn't like the pictures but has no problem with hunting, and I trail off with my own mumbled response about sport vs. survival, a point that feels pointless in this province.

Back up front, in the store, a rack of magazines sets its sights on the hunter porn market: Big Buck vies for space with Guns & Ammo monthly, the two top sellers taking up three rows between them. Further down on the bottom shelf, homemaking guidance waits for a willing woman. If I'd ever had the time to forget, I'm reminded: more than most places, there are few ways to be a man or a woman in Alberta, and fewer still for everyone else.

I turn to a wall of dried beef chips and jerky sticks, jumbo bags of cheese snacks, pot noodles, barbecue sauce and candy chews, and realise without suprise that there's nothing here for me. I push on a fluttering for sale sign and find my way outside, swallowed whole by a low cloud of roadside dust, facing the evening, the mountains, and the places that still pull me westward.

One of these things is not like the others...

Have been playing geek girl all day trying to make a myspace page for shaz and her wares...so now that my face is a shrivelled replica of its former self due to 5 hours of not blinking, I shy away from typing more and offer only one little thing from my camera:

Edmontonian

Nothing here will show itself until May. Not one leaf, one petal, one stem. After a long winter and the cautious arrival of a stop/start spring, things take their time here, and they dress in layers.

...

Last time I was in Edmonton I found myself ducking behind poster poles and sliding round street corners with crowds of strangers as decoys - avoiding familiar faces in a place that had memories running thick through every gutter and drain.

Last time I was in Edmonton, it was a dry run of previous years in which I'd almost drowned. No ghosts as such - just old smells and the remembrance of waterlogged ears. Faces that distorted as light passed through layers of silt.

That was before. Three months before I took off for the desert and somehow managed to find a way through a place with no paths - my own southern Alberta badlands. That was before - and now, this visiting time, I find myself walking slow, watching the places I spent my time with roll past me as 3D postcards...or fully rendered film that shows the shells and approximate locations of all the comedy, drama and farce of those six years:

the foyer staircase I stood in, wearing an ill-fitting dress from my mum's hippy past, singing way out of my range and calling it experimental (instead of just bad)

the tree at the bus stop where the man with the awful wig would hide, every day, apologising with his eyes, too young and insecure for Patrick Stewart baldness

the grey stretch of concrete and glass through which many of my friendships and reheated rice meals passed

and the kids park where I lost my grip

there's the most uninspiring building for miles, still crouching, its head beneath its shoulders, heavy eyes open just a crack

and further down the way, a cafe tucked into a sidestreet, name changed, food rearranged and its outfit completely refitted...but still talking the same way to my tongue

the studenty bar hanging on every word that falls from the lips of Whyte Avenue and its little shops...

...of nouveau rockabilly dresses and tailored trilbys, 200-run CDs and a junk shop that's still so good at marketing that it's been convincing antiques and collectable crap into arty houses for well over a decade now

Scottish Imports sports a suggestive mannequin man in kilt and spread legs, beside can of weather worn warm Irn Bru

and next door the only vegatarian restaurant for a whole province knows that it is small and perfect

...


I can romanticise this place because I left, with no intention of ever coming back.

I knew that then, and so now I take my tourist eyes, my rose-coloured bittersweet eyes that see the bits they want to, and I glide through these old postcards with only a few companions. The ones that stuck. The ones who let me stick. The ones who've seen me at my worst and still make time for me.

Three people in this whole city. Who make me laugh and think and cry and wonder and feel that quiet, wide stretch of calm that opens up in the company of those who know me and love me well - three.

In a place that used to be full of my chaos, three is a perfect number.