Weekenders in places with names I can't pronounce

Yesterday I called to book 'our' place in the Ardennes, and it was full . . . as was every other place in the area. And despite the dreadful yet fruitful agony of having obtained my full license, I'm not yet allowed to rent a car here - you need to have had the permit for two years - and the F-word won't, so I spent a panicked hour searching for somewhere else to kayak and get fresh air that we could get to with trains.

Well, thank god for this disorganized industrial shithole of a country being next to the Netherlands. We're going here. Dordrecht. An hour and a half away, I've managed to book some boats that look much nicer than the tubs in the Ardennes, and it's next to this, so it's going to be fucking awesome, I'm pretty sure. Even if it pisses down rain all weekend (and we seem to be in the grip of some sort of wildly geographically misplaced Indian summer here so I don't think it will), I'm pretty sure we'll get a lot out of going to a place with folklore this bizarre.

God, I love the Dutch. Not just for the social liberalism and their stunning good looks. I love their weird, too. I'd love Belgians' wierd as well, but it seems to segue into creep far too often for comfort. I think it will be a good policy to spend the maximum amount of time in the Netherlands before we leave. It's just so much less annoying. Shame about the food but one always manages.

Speaking of food, this site makes me hungry.

Tai chi is a kind of martial art, I suppose

Really need the brief escape to the Ardennes this weekend. Last night in tai chi I spent about 15 minutes of what should have been pure tranquility, what should have been my mid-week détente with my professional stress, wanting to punch these dumb gallic bitches who wouldn't stop chattering in their dumb gallic high-pitched squeaky little voices during the exercises. Punch them right in the mouths. It doesn't matter that I'd cut my hand on their teeth and get an infection, I thought. It'd be worth it. I'd enjoy the memory all my life, long after the antibiotics stop making me poo funny.

Of course I didn't. It would have embarrassed the F-word, who was there too. And even though I certainly wouldn't go to prison as they're too full in this retarded country for anybody who gets a sentence under three years to actually be incarcerated, and even if I did I could just escape via helicopter because these fucking fuckwits here are too fuckwitted to co-ordinate putting up a couple of goddamn wires (the prison in the story, BTW, is a seven-minute walk from our place), it might interfere with my Australian residency application. Lucky gallic bitches.

Anyways, I have my doubts about the tai chi class this year. Too many chattering gallic bitches, it's been moved from seven minutes away (directly across from the prison in the story, actually) to fifteen minutes away, and the timing is way off - 20h30 to 22h. That means I have to eat before-hand, but Wednesday being deadline day I can't do so early enough in the evening to avoid feeling like I'm going through the session with a bowling ball in my tummy. Also I find tai chi beautifully energizing, which means I don't really get any sleep Wednesday nights anymore. And finally, 20h30 is usually the time, these days, that my professional stress catches up with me and I get really good-for-nothing exhausted, making it fucking penitential to go out into the fucking Nordic darkness of the early autumn nightfall.

The office monkey got her groove back

I've got my groove back at work, thank god. When fresh back from Canada, I couldn't really imagine getting it back ever again. But then Big Report Weeks came and my motivation managed to rise to the challenge, and now I'm sufficiently psyched to be awesome for another year.

Also significant is that my company may have something for me when we make the big move to to the Dustbowl Down Under - nothing close to decided on that score yet - but I'm already doing some tasks associated with the possibility that are very congenial to me, I think more congenial than what I'm doing now, if I can learn how to get good at them. Also one gets the sense Australia is about to descend into chaos so it would be good to have a nice fat slice of income coming in from abroad.

Yeah . . . so many disastrous things get reported about Australia that it gets to sounding apocalyptic, especially in view of the Mad Max Factor. I have visions of myself clutching up my family in five years time and bustling them off to the frigid safety of Canada's backwoods as leathered sodomites on motorcycles chase the townspeople through endless vistas of flood, fire, snakes and blood-red dust while Nick Cave sings "Tupelo".



So you see why I've got to go, right, I mean that sounds fucking awesome.

But when you speak to Australians they claim all the apocalyptic press is just British journalists being monumentally jealous of Australians getting to live in Australia while British journalists have to live in a moldy, violent shithole like Britain where everybody is as drunk as in Australia but they have to live much closer together. And being acquainted with what kind of shitholes the parts of Britain people actually live in are, it's a possibility I really can't discount.

Who knows? Me, hopefully, and soon.

Buck up - never say die! We'll get along

I think I've found my political Messiah . . . pity he's a kiddie-fiddler who's been dead for 32 years. Oh well. There have been dumber ideological choices made, as mine is on the basis of this rather wonderful movie:



What I noticed all through it is that the pacing is superb. No dead space, no holes. It's an extremely well put-together film, aside from the funniness factor - far better than most American films made before the 50's in terms of just being spectacularly well put-together. And it's fucking funny. Particularly for us pinko stoners.

BTW - here's a Guarniad review from 1936 about the film. It must have been strange back in the days when newspaper entertainment section writers were allowed to use the present perfect and words like "undeliberating". Keep on to the end, to the section about how the Nazis banned it, and of course the moustache . . .

In which I fail to count my blessings

People, I'm fucked up. I know I'm fucked up because I was wandering around Istanbul bored off my tits yesterday afternoon, wishing - actually actively desiring - that all the people around me were trees instead.

I don't know whether or not I can really recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination, I don't have enough information after five days. The 'social programme' of the conference would have made me come in my panties five years ago; dinner in a giant Byzantine water cistern, a cruise down the Bosphorus, black tie gala in an early 20th century vizier's yali. But I spent it ovulating, wishing that I was being ploughed by the single attractive man at that fucking sausage-fest of a conference, studiously avoiding him in defense of my monogamism, and thinking about how all the breathtakingly beautiful things I was looking at were representative of a long and super-successful massive oppression of man by his fellow man. I'm fucking laugh-a-minute, people. Laugh-a-fucking-minute.

It was a relief to hit Saturday morning and run away to my much cheaper hotel and to all the sights I wanted to see. The Hagia Sophia, or as a particularly retarded American woman who was accompanying her husband to the conference called it with a rather shocking familiarity, "Sophia"* , was very beautiful and it satisfied the part of me who had had to study it a kajillion times in sundry art and architecture classes to explore it. But not being in a particularly arty frame of mind I was much more impressed by the Blue Mosque next door, which frankly was tidier, and still functioning as a religious institution. I was handed a pamphlet on the joys of Islam on my way in and was so impressed and so moved by the interior that I nearly read it.

And there were lots of other wondrous things about the city, but I only had two days to look at them, which means I didn't even scrape the surface - what I did was the equivalent of going to Paris, walking from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre to Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, with a quick trip up to the Marché aux Puces (Grand Bazaar, which was nice, I found a bunch of super-cheap fabric). That's why I can't say whether or not I recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination - I still don't know shit about it - not much more than I knew before.

Also, as I mentioned, people, I'm fucked up. It didn't feel exotic to me, it didn't feel exciting; it felt like every other big Mediterranean city I've been to, with touts yelling about how awesome the shit they were selling was, and too many men trying to chat me up in the quest for some fast tail or a North American residency visa, and too many people wandering around, and too many tourists speaking stupidities in snatches of languages I understood, and too much dirt on the ground and shit in the air, and too many drivers acting like brainless cunts.

And I know this sort of misplaced indifference, this 'it's all the fucking same anyways', is a symptom of depression, but I've been depressed, and this isn't depression. This is misanthropy, running away with me. I don't get homesick in the normal sense of the word - I miss my family desperately sometimes, but I don't particularly want to be back in Canada - but sometime in the middle of the Istanbul trip, when I realized that my brain was approaching the experience as simply another stay in a place with too many damn people in it, I thought of so much yearning of kayaking down the La Vase with no people in sight, or right in Lake Nipissing far away from everything, or hiking through the woods with my family, that the tears started to my eyes.

I may as well face it. I was raised in the middle of nowhere, isolated, and while I spent a lot of the time I was being raised wishing that I was somewhere with more people, trees and fresh air were my constant companions and trees and fresh air are probably where I need to go. Particularly on my vacations, since the wait until I can take myself there more permanently seems interminable. Taking a break from one dirty overcrowded city full of annoying people to go to another has turned out to not be such a hot experience.

Whine . . . complete.

*As in, "the mosaics in Sophia weren't that great. Now look at my photos of them." That wasn't what I was basing my evaluation of her retardation on, BTW - more on her opinion of what a shame it was all the black people who didn't know what they were doing turned out to vote Democrat last year instead of staying home like they usually do. Sure lady, like white Americans have a fucking clue what they're doing if they're trying out any task more complicated than stuffing their fucking cracker face with Twinkies or changing the channel from Fox to Fox News. Of course, there are always exceptions, like anyone reading this blog. Smile.

How can something so wrong feel so right?

So today at the conference there was a two point five hour session that had nothing to do, even tangentially, with anything I have anything to do with, so I got my first Turkish bath. I made the mistake of reading about them on Wikipedia right before I went in an effort to not commit any massive nude-y faux pas, which left me agonizing while I lay naked on the hot marble slab about using an institution with so many historical associations with the most exploitative kind of sex slavery. I won't say the agony stopped once the attendant came in, took off her clothes, and started exfoliating me all over; in fact in a certain moral sense it got worse when I realized halfway through that I was 75% passively ready for the dirtiest possible scenario in which the situation could go. But it was still a really lovely experience, particularly getting covered with bubbles and massaged.

But do I reccommend it? I don't know. It's causing me the same level, if not the same brand of moral confusion and disturbance the Berlin Zoo did the last time I skipped out of a conference to enjoy myself. In a certain sense I don't think you should be in a position where you should be able to pay someone to wash you for pleasure; it offends my communist sensibilities. And yet my hard-nosed capitalist side says it's my economic duty as a monied person to hire less monied people to do things for me, even things that my cultural upbringing informs me are actually my job, or possibly the F-word's, except our bathroom is too unromantic.

And then the psychoanalyzed side of me informs me it's fucking weird, though obviously completely predictable, that it's such a pleasurable and relaxing experience to be so infantilized by a woman my age (the attendant) taking a role no-one has taken since my mother when I was about three years old. My psychoanalyzed side is also informing me it's wierd I'm caring about being cleaned off by a professional when I've got undressed and massaged by a kajillion different professional therapists without ever questioning anything about anything except that it was awesome.

I don't know. My guess is I'll probably do it again, though not at a five-star hotel, because the stale atmosphere of bourgeois decadence and entitlement is probably what's killing my buzz. The thing is in view of my nut allergy my pleasures are a little limited here - about 3/4 of the food is off limits - so I'm looking for other ways to spoil myself - I guess this is why I've never travelled in Asia. Oh well, there are enough other nice things, I'll just keep eating bananas and watermelon. Maybe it can turn into some awesome new fad diet.

The worst joke in the world

Q: What's a five star hotel in Istanbul exactly like?

A: Every other fucking five star hotel in the world.

All over continental Europe, even the bit the other Europeans argue isn't Europe (and this place is fucking Europe, man, it's obvious in everything from the way people dress to the way they overcook their vegetables) it's the same fucking story: anodyne marble and carpet without any ununiformed proles; a Holiday Inn with a health spa and a shitload of overpampered congress delegates.

Fuckin' speed the weekend.

Eating the balcony

Feeling better, on the mend-ish. Still pretty gross but enjoying staying in my pyjamas all day. Someday life will be like this, and not just when I've got a fucking pandemic.

Not much other news that's fit to print today, so a garden update. My aloe pups, apparently while I've been in Canada, have taken off and look quite good. Christmas presents! Yay! The tomatilloes have also finally taken off too, at least somewhat, on their second flowering; we have five or six fruit on the go. And the capsicum are fruiting too. The lemon cucumbers have done very well, and are still producing; I've lost count of what we've got off them. Not enough for pickling, though - just stuffing in our faces right off the vine. The peas have been and gone, really minimally, but Daddy had warned us not to expect anything out of peas in containers, so I'm not upset.

The tomatoes have been the biggest disappointment so far - no potash and they've mostly got rot spots. Well, we won't make that mistake again. They're still fruiting. We'll see how gentle the autumn is and what we can get out of it - but it's all experimental at this point, in anticipation of life with a fucking garden, man. In Australia we'll have a constant growing season and will actually be able to feed ourselves a fair go - like when I was a child. I want to be ready. I feel ready. It's hard to wait, in fact.

In the meantime, I haven't quite made up my mind if next summer we'll garden again or if I'll have a go at raising some dragon trees for private sale in the nicer pots. A bit of column A and a bit of column B, I think.

Filthy swine

I've got swine flu, the friendly house-call doctor reckons. House calls. They're awesome. I didn't even have to change out of my pyjamas. It's good to know I can drop out of wondering about commercial-ethical problems with conventional medicine and whether the vaccine race is a big circular scammy money maker or not now because, well, I've already got it, don't I? I fucking knew this would happen. What don't I get that's catchable through nose-picking? Fuck.

He also said that based on when my symptoms began I won't be infectious anymore by Wednesday, so I can still go to Istanbul . . . working on the assumption that the city is open for business after the floods. The rain has stopped and the conference organizers, who are no doubt shitting themselves, have sent out reassuring emails about how everything is still a go. Personally I want the food that will be attached to the conference so bad that I'll cry if it isn't a go. But I really, really don't want to go in for any disaster tourism.

We meant to get me some tree-time this weekend in one of the few national parks Belgium boasts but I was too sick, so instead we watched Bruno and 30 Rock. Bruno was pretty funny, I guess. I liked his assistant, who I can't find out anything about except that he's Swedish, which is probably why he consented to do such outrageous things that would be widely considered career killers outside of Scandinavia. You have to admire the balls of it all but I guess I'd been expecting too much and only got three or four belly-laughs out of the experience. 30 Rock, of course, I love. What a great show. I wrote before it's no Arrested Development and it's true, but it's as good in its own way. Such great characters. At least one belly-laugh per 20-minute episode. The last one that nearly made me die, as the swine flu is putting some fairly severe limits on my respiratory abilities, was:

Kenneth: Well, you know what they say: 'Money is the root of all evil.'
Tracey: I thought that was just a tag line for my movie, Death Bank.

It was actually sort of scary, I think the F-word was mere moments away from calling me an ambulance. . . .

Everything is still about me

I feel a little better about Jemima because now my mum and dad are both taking her out for paddles quite regularly. I was shocked my dad is taking her out. He has a cat-like relationship with water. But I must have enthused enough because apparently he's taken to it like crazy. That makes me happy. I still miss her but I'm glad she's getting some without me, and say what you will about the inappropriacy of love for inanimate objects, but that's a less selfish emotion than I've ever been able to drum up for any man I've ever nailed.

In other news, much of the major flooding in Istanbul rolled out on the highway between the aeroport and the centre. We've gotten reassuring letters from the conference organizers about how everything is still a go but I suppose I'll reserve judgement until the day before or the morning of. I'll be very sad if I can't go there after wanting to for so long, but I'm not into disaster tourism. All those poor people.

So much rain, so little water

Sigh. A week today is the last time I went kayaking, with my awesome nephew, on Lake Ontario. I miss my family incredibly and I miss kayaking too, not quite as much as my family but pretty bad, and I miss my kayak. According to all that market profiling I used to have to follow, I have a real masculine streak when it comes to toys - I don't buy a lot of them, but when I do I research the hell out of them and then just love love love them when I get them. And I love Jemima. She was money well spent just for the use I got out of her over two weeks, and now Mum is taking her out, and the kids and my brothers will too, hopefully, and I will too when I go home - I don't regret the purchase at all but I was not expecting this horrible sensation of missing her so bad.

And so futilely. What would I do if she was here? In this fucking waterless city. This fuck-all of a city. This fucking pavé jungle of a city. I could have every kayak in the world here and I'd still be fucked. Except I could sell them and use the money to move to a better fucking city with some fucking water in it. Sigh.

All this whining just to get to a point that actually is of fairly universal interest: a couple of weeks of kayaking for a couple of hours every morning totally made my tits way more perky, and I was already pretty happy with my tits. I've had to revise my plan to get them chopped off when I turn 50 and they're no longer good for much besides hindering me when I run for trains: instead I'm just going to move to a place with some water in it and kayak for a few hours every day. And hopefully, so doing, the ladies will accompany me into a ripe old age, standing proud until the end.

Maybe the songbirds needed universal healthcare

Canada was a little funny. Missing it in a fierce and generalized sense at the moment because everybody was just a little polite to each other - a sort of generalized, unconscious consent to not be absolute bastards to everyone around you in the unvocalized understanding that it would help stop everyone, including you, from losing their shit. Not an understanding that's penetrated too far into the Belgian unconsciousness, I'll fucking tell you that. Also it was cleaner, the air even in Toronto was roughly 50 times more breathable than here, and there were lots of birds and crickets, again even in Toronto. I was a little unnerved this morning when I listened to how quiet it was - just the screeching invasive parrots and the magpies - though I did miss the magpies. Just birds left here, essentially, who have good enough reasoning skills to change their eating habits to be eating our shit instead of all the native insects and vegetation millenia of too many fucking Europeans has killed off.

Anyways, that was a bit tangential, when what I wanted to write was that Canada is a little weird because nobody there called it 'swine flu' anymore, they all called it H1N1, and there were hand sanitizers fuckin' everywhere. I guess a bunch of people there died of SARS so the caution is a little excessive; either that or we've been living next to those paranoiacs in the States for too long.

Speaking of paranoiacs in the States, and health, my boss sent me this clip:



I've been doing my level best to just ignore what's happening in the States now because it just drives me batshit. I can have a higher level of discourse with my used menstrual pads and as far as anyone has been able to figure out my only diagnosable mental disorder is SAD. It did feel nice to see some old Jewish guy (he is Jewish, right? I have this game I like playing here in Europe called "gay or French", and when it comes to Americans I'm thinking of starting one called "eloquent or Jewish") respond to the healthcare/Nazi thing as it deserved to be responded to - which is, not.

But the very fact that question gets asked in a public forum - how ass-clenchingly embarassing. I'm starting to feel guilty that the US is going high comedy as it turns in on itself - that like Italy, it's just turning into a place you can laugh at until you cry. But I guess the big difference is in the States the electorate handed out such a clear whine for change and if they don't get it they won't deserve not getting it. I don't know, man. It's like watching a car crash that can either end in absolute fucking carnage (likely) or a perfect triple-axle spin and triumphant landing on the opposite lane, speeding off in the other direction (less likely, judging from the historical record).

And this little piggy cried "waaaaaaah" all the way home

Back to work today - yesterday worked from home, which is completely different. Gah. This little time coming up won't be days of wine and roses but at least I get to go to Turkey next week. Extra painful because the F-word is back at school now, and I hadn't fully realized how much I like him being on vacation (ie, more present, less stressed)- combined with not having quite realizing how much I'd missed him. In a healthy world I'd be able to cuddle him all day today, getting it out of my system. In this unhealthy world, we'll both work ridiculous hours, come home cranky, and I'll snap at him when he treads in my cat's puke and fails to clean it up and he'll snap at me when I do whatever revolting, inconsiderate thing it is I do, and the cuddles will be under-realized.

Fuck you, work.

At the moment, also missing my family and my kayak like crazy. My family rather more. Especially the kids. It does my head in to be so far away from the kids. And Luke Duke too - I don't have favourites but he's the one who's always been most present whilst having the excuses to be the least present, so it's usually rather more of a tear to go away from him. God, they're so great. And while there was no hesitation in my heart about rushing back to my lover, I am FUCKING PISSED to be in this stupid shithole of a country if I must be away from my awesome family. Oh my god, what a nasty, soulless crappery Francophone Europe is.

I knew I was fucking home when I went to the TGV platform at Charles de Gaulle aeroport, put up my feet, waited for my 7:45 train, and got told off by some cunt of an SNCF worker for waiting on the platform when my train had just been cancelled, and to get up to the main concourse immediately to find out what I'd have to do to move my exhausted self and my fucking 70 kilos of luggage to Brussels instead. That's this fucking place, man. That's Francophone Europe. When some absolute bullocks happens to someone, like their train from one shitty European city they don't want to be in to another they don't want to go to getting cancelled when they've just been on a fucking overnight transatlantic flight and shed a kajillion tears saying goodbye to their awesome, awesome family, the institutional reaction is aggression to the victim.

And the thing that really fucking pisses me off about that is that it's not because of an unfocussed aggression or film-y frenchy existentialist angst or anything that fucking picturesque; it's pure fucking laziness, because minute-for-minute it saves time to pre-emptively aggress someone who might get justifiably angry into going away from where you are instead of just presenting the situation to them like a fucking grown-up and possibly having to listen to them get upset about their fucking, fucking train to Brussels getting cancelled.

One more year, one more year, one more year. I can do it. If the past two weeks flew by so unbearably fast, I can do it.

Wet rolls and dry panties

Alright, I don't know if it's not getting laid for a near-record (in the context of this living arrangement) of three weeks (my time in Canada plus the F-word's dad's time here - I'm a bit of a screamer and it's a smallish apartment) but Ken Whiting has suddenly become the sexiest thing on legs. Or on the water. Whatever. Damn. I watched his sea kayaking video with other people in my family who like kayaking the other day and liked it fine, but didn't realize until halfway through the plane ride back across the Atlantic more than 24 hours later that he's filthy hot. Those preternatural hips and that cute Ottawa valley accent. Is it just me? Possibly.


Anyways, after I realized Ken Whiting is filthy hot, I sat there watching Air France's marginally less-shitty-than-last-time cinematic offering, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past - oh, I don't know actually, it may have been as shitty as 17 Again - it'd be quite a shitfight between the two of those.

But I digress. I was sitting there watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and thinking about how some Hollywood producer type somewhere was obviously expecting girls like me to wet their panties over Matthew McConnauwhatever, but my panties stayed dry, not only because I think it was intended to be a romantic comedy and romantic comedies don't get me there, but because Matthew McConnauwhatever doesn't demonstrate sea kayak rolls in swimming pools topless like Ken Whiting does. Also I'm pretty sure Matthew McConnauwhatever waxes, and I don't believe in men waxing. Even though I've seen plenty of them do it. It's just gross and it makes me wonder what sort of bizarro natural body-hair patterns they're trying to hide.

Cabbage soul

Kayaking on Lake Ontario was pretty nice. No wind but some interesting waves from all the big boats. Lots of birds. Passing right under the landing path for the abomination of the island aeroport, which was neat. And of course it's such an incredibly beautiful view of Toronto coming back from the Islands. The CN Tower may be a big awful eyesore, but the Toronto skyline taken as a whole is better for it. More depth.

Got some lovely time with Gigi and Lady and Gigi's fiancé last night. Walked from his condo to Luke Duke's place this morning, going past my old place through Cabbagetown on the way. Cabbagetown is probably the first neighborhood I've ever really loved and it's changing; I'm not frightfully comfortable with it. It's next to Regent Park and has a lot of crackheads wandering around, and that used to keep out the wrong class of people - you know, young urban professionals who move into a cool neighborhood because it's cool and then spend the next ten years writing angry letters to drive all the coolness out - kept out the Starbucks, in short; Cabbagetown sort of maintained this sense of cool and community since time immemorial, balanced between sketch and class, resisting anodyne gentrification in a way no other Toronto neighborhood I'm aware of, besides maybe the Junction, ever managed.

Well. There's a Starbucks there now, because Regent Park is being overhauled into a mixed income development, the crackheads are being slowly pushed out and the yuppies are moving in in droves. But the Starbucks is standing completely empty. Instead the yuppies are cluttering up Jet Fuel, where the bike couriers still go and where I had to wait ten minutes for my coffee, and the Tamil bakery up the street that does the strange cheese pastries, which I had a horrible 30 seconds thinking has closed until I saw in my desperation it had expanded into much nicer premises three doors down.

I'm hoping against hope the spirit of Cabbagetown will prevail.

Thoroughly terribly contemptible

Nice to be back in Toronto, up to a point. Heaven knows I don't consider Brussels a paragon of civic awesomeness and it's great to be back where there are so many Asians with their delicious, delicious restaurants, but this city has its own elements of shitholery that instinctively perhaps, because I'm my grandmother's granddaughter, I'm finding it pretty easy to be judgemental about. Case in point: you want me to pay $2.75 a ride for that piece of shit public transportation system? What? $2.fuckin75? Are you serious? You pay half that to be wafted around any major European capital, on much less circuitous, crippled and crowded routes, London excepted of course but then London is a bit of an exception to everything decent, that fucking shopping mall.

Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.

Catharsis

So it's a lovely day and I'm off to go kayaking again, this time to see how far up the La Vase river I can get in Jemima, the boat I bought last week, which was not designed for seeing how far one can get up a river, being 14.5 feet long. And in terms of following the historical trade route portage, which I have no intention of doing this year, and little interest in doing next, I'm not really heading in the right direction, going upstream from the end, Champlain Park at Lake Nipissing, instead of starting from the beginning, Trout Lake (home of the monster, which had the good manners not to eat me on countless daytime and moonlit dips).

But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.

First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.

Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).

This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.

The ones I've loved the longest

Actual dialogue from this weekend:

Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.

The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.

Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.

Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:

Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.

And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:

Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.

I am become She-Bogan, Destroyer of Taste

Yesterday was my first solo drive ever. And it was to the beer store to pick up a plank of 50, in my brother's pickup, wearing a home-made Wonder Woman singlet, Uggs, 30 visible blackfly bites, unwashed hair, and a miniskirt. I considered it a beautiful synthesis of hoser and bogan; indeed, possibly the creation of a new subspecies of easy livers: the Great Northern Ontario She-Bogan.

I'll let you know how my classy new lifestyle goes.

Air Canada next time, perhaps

I've been kayaking rather than blogging since getting to North Bay, but this morning I'm respecting my aching muscles and taking a little break. I could chill your blood with photos of my legs and the revolting farm of mosquito and blackfly bites bursting out of the skin there but tonnes of other disgusting things are happening in the world, so why subject you to mine . . . and I'm trying to be stoic and take it as preparation for moving to a country where everything bites.

Just to say that on the plane ride over, the only movies on offer were Hannah Montana: The Movie and Seventeen Again. I watched both. And Air France, you fucking cunt, you have sooooo lost this customer. The only reason I flew on your craptacular aeroplanes that keep crashing and put up with your stewardesses' shitful behaviour and consistently and obligingly changed seats on every flight I've flown with you in the last five years as your agents are too fucking retarded to book families seats together is because you have seatback movie screens with a wide selection, not so that I can fucking sit there and watch a generation of young girls educated to have the most fuckwitted and unrealistic priorities in the history of society by an underaged, overprivileged celebrity daughter lipsynching, poncing around on a horse and 'scoring' with sexless blond adolescent cowboys who don't try to get into her fucking pants, or by an unthreatening, dancing, selectively waxed male model educating a highschool using his 'hotness' into believing that sex is only for making baby daughters and yet a boy getting onto the basketball team is a sign that you should nail him.

What fucking element of my painstakingly compiled customer profile, the one that makes you spam me up the douchehole, encouraged you to think this was a good fucking idea? Fuck you, you fucking fuckers. Air Fucking France indeed. It's all in the name, isn't it? God I hate the French. BTW, I used to, uhm, "try to make baby daughters" with a guy who looked like Zac Efron and he was the filthiest pervert I've ever given an opportunity to express himself. A propos of nothing. Just good memories.