It Just Gets Weirder

That’s right.  If you can say it you can do it. Everything’s a mystery now.  You just don’t know what’s coming next but at least you’ve realized that’s how it should be, instead of fighting it.  It just flows.  You don’t want to die.  You try to be on time.  It takes guts to do anything after all you’ve learned, but punctuality is the main thing when you come up here.  Your girlfriend may not be on time but you have to be.  If you aren’t she’ll beat your head in.  Word of caution.  Never, ever have an 80 year old girlfriend.  It’s terribly difficult to explain.

I’ve figured something out.  There comes a time in everyone’s life when you need it.  You need it but more importantly it needs you, and even if you didn’t need it, you’d want to be around for your girlfriend.  He always has whatever you need.

Get out the ‘writing helper.’  Because it’s too late, and you can’t do this anymore.  You’re not ‘getting and spending’ and that quote from Dr Johnson haunts you.  ‘Nobody but a low-down, filthy con-artist ever wrote for anything but money.’  So what’s going on here?

Fact is I like it here because nobody bothers me.  I get very few mentions and there’s something else.  I’m powerless, really, to effect change.  Have no illusions.  You can do everything right and no one will notice.  Why should they?  Who are they, anyway?  It’s not about content, it’s about the triumph of ephemerality.  It’s about mastery of the inconsequential.

Allen Wrenches.  What do you know about this guy?  He’s a tool.  He’s a pistol.  I figure my girlfriend’ll know about this clown and we’ll have our solution.  My girlfriend has tools that have tools.  Incredibly well connected.  And I need something so here I go.  I despise tools.  I won’t have one in the house.

PhotoBoothWhat?

It’s a nice drive up to the old sod in slumbering Point Grey.  Everything’s been planted here long ago.  A lot of houses are disappearing in the face of thundering new houses.  The sod went up in 1913 but will be staying on as long as my girlfriend’s around.  We down a kilt-lifter to kick things off then move on to Señor Wrenches.  He’s got a lot of friends in an old salad dressing jar.  I remember this line of salad dressings.  They used to locate in the produce section, not in the salad dressing aisle, so they were special.  The jar is brim with the tool in all its many sizes.  I don’t know what I’m doing so take the whole jar.  There’s a problem at home with a tap and before we send in the plumbers we’re pledged to try a fix ourselves.

We talk irrelevancies, my girlfriend and I, then I drive away.  Down the hill I try everything in the bottle but the fishhook circa 1937, but nothing works.  We just can’t do it.  A part’s coming from Barrie, Ontario and if it don’t get here soon even Russell Crowe won’t help.  To rinse a glass is to take a bath.  I forget the rest.  What’s a fish hook doing in a jar of wrenches?  Thought about that one too.  It’s about as sensible as anything else around here.

The thing is you try.  You try and fail and you try again and fail again.  Then you try again and fail again.  So what’s it about?  It’s about failure.  I think it was C. States, in  a slightly different context, who uncovered that gem.  Failure will admit of no solution but success will.  Let’s drop some big likes on that idea.  I’m ready.

 

 

Friendship

March 31, 2014.  Strange, new, unfamiliar year (SNUY).  I call an old friend, culmination of a plan more than a year in the making.  I call him Sunday thinking there’ll be a better chance of reaching him and I’m right.  Here he is.  He’d been working on that really expensive bridge out there in Burnaby or Coquitlam or wherever it is for a really long time, but I knew that was over.  I remember the last time I’d talked to him calling him at eight o’clock on a Saturday night.  He was at work, which surprised me.  We had to hang up. Normally Clanbrassil will talk your ear off.  He seems to live on the phone.

“I gotta go, Steve.  I’m at work.”

“Well, why don’t you get to work then?  Why are you talking to me?”

I met Adrian Clanbrassil in the 20th century in a bizarre place called Wakeman Sound.  He was a hard working, hard playing veteran and I was “green”.  The business was timber extraction and the only way to get to it was by air.  It was a remote site.  I’d gotten into the business because I needed money and wanted to do something different.  Clanbrassil was here for some of the same reasons.  He’d spent several seasons in another company camp on the Nekite River north of here that was logged out now, which was why he was at Wakeman.  He was pulling rigging on a side I was assigned to one summer Saturday.

I learned the first day I met Clanbrassil that I was connected to him in an odd way.  We were both from town and most of these clowns in the logging show were from Vancouver Island.  When I found out he’d grown up in Point Grey I told him my girlfriend had too.  He asked me her name.  “I was their paperboy,” he said.  When he was a kid he’d delivered the paper to States’ parent’s house.  I definitely never thought I’d meet anyone who could say that in this place.

Adrian and I became friends and stayed friends long after our careers in the woods were over.  How often do you have the opportunity of making a new friend?  We had a lot in common.  We were both white, both male and both enjoyed a good time.  We didn’t see each other a lot but stayed in touch.  He used to call out of the blue, or I’d call him.  He did building technology at BCIT and made good money in construction.  I took a vow of poverty and started working in the book business.

Before hanging up that last time I asked him how his partner was.  I’d never met her but knew Anne and he had been together a long time, going back to when he went into rehab.  I was surprised and a little shocked to hear him say, “We’re not living together anymore.  We broke up.”  My cliché thought was,  “I hope he hasn’t started drinking again.”  I’d been thinking about it on and off ever since.  Was my friend all right?

I remembered when he quit drinking.  I’d called him and he was in Crescent Beach, living at a recovery house.  I  knew how difficult it must have been for him.  He always prided himself on his work ethic and was very solid at what he did, but there’d been a mystery developing the last few years.  His marriage had ended.  I knew he’d bought a small condo and walked away from it.  Then he left the country to work on a construction project in Taipei.  I didn’t know, but doing that might have been as much about avoiding debt collectors as any cold, hard desire to work in Taipei.  When he came back it was like he was on the lam.  He’d even importuned my mother-in-law and invited himself to stay in an upstairs bedroom of her house, a strange situation that lasted about a month and led to a bit of a falling out between us.  “Why, actually, are you here?”  I already knew the answer.  Adrian Clanbrassil’s life had run off the rails.

I think I didn’t want to hear my friend’s life was messed up again.  But you think like that and then you think, it’s your friend, right?  Does it matter what’s happened?  He’s your friend.  He’s an adult.  He’s a strong guy.  You were a team in the glory days and you want to know what’s become of your friend.  A friend doesn’t say “forget it” about a friend.

And here he is.  He sounds fine.  He sounds the same.  He says he’s at his girlfriend’s.  So he’s got a “girlfriend”.  That’s good.  He tells me he’s living in a trailer park near Boundary Bay.  Clanbrassil living in a trailer park.  Why does that not sound ridiculous?  There’s almost something right about it.  We don’t talk about the past.  I don’t ask him if he’s drinking.  It’s not my business.  This is a quick social call to verify we’re both still out here.  We’ve done it.  We’ve kept in touch, like old friends.  I can’t help him with his problems anymore than he can help me with mine.  Doesn’t matter.  Friendship’s not about problems.  Professionals deal with problems.  We’re just friends.  Let’s keep it that way.

 

'Nuthin but blue skies'

 

 

Spring Broke

That’s right.  Check your bank account.  You have a bank account, don’t you?  The kids’ll be taking a break and you’re broke.  You’ve been broke for some time now, haven’t you?  Like, if you’ve got two hundred dollars in the bank you’re feeling flush, right?  Feeling chipper?  Ready for Vegas?  Your account balance is $46.21.  You have no investments, no RSPs, no TFSAs.  You had to sell off all that to survive.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s bridge under the water.  Now it’s about the $46.21.  Poverty teaches many things.  The main lesson is it’s a lesson you didn’t need.

Being broke actually gives you a lot of power.  It’s not really great power, but still.  You have the power to say “no” to so much.  It’s the triumph of being broke.  You’ve made it.  You’re indifferent.  Let’s take a short break here to have a look at nature’s riches.

Team Crocus

Being broke means you’ve bought one pair of pants in the last five years.  You did well, really saved up.  You went without so that others could shine then finally you went out and bought those pants.  They cost you a dollar.  As for shoes, well, there’s been no shoes.  It’s a good thing you stocked up on shoes when you had the chance because even now, at this advanced date, some of those shoes are still wearable.  It’s close, but you can kind of fake along, right?  You go from strength to strength and it’s the power of the impoverished.  You’ve sacrificed everything for capital A Art and it isn’t until recently that you’ve realized the guy’s name’s not Art at all.  It’s Phil.  There’s been a error somewhere and you made it.  And Phil is not locatable.  Is that a word?  Everything’s a word here.  Locate?  Lo-cat?  Able?  Locate-a-cat?  ‘I should think that something must be terribly wrong somewhere.’

It’s five years now that you’ve been this broke.  Everything’s five years.  You used to buy anything you wanted.  Lots of pants and shoes, and shirts too as well as coats and jackets.  These days you’re still holding the line on shirts.  You haven’t bought one shirt in the last five years.  You’ve “borrowed” one jacket, meaning you wore it on a guestworker gig and neglected to return it. You liked it because it was black like you and carried no insignia of any kind and you knew, anyway, it was from Costco and cost about thirty-eight cents.  And anyway later the proprietor said it’s okay, keep it, you earned it, and she was right.  So you did.  You haven’t bought a coat, sweater or even a pair of shorts.  Okay you’ve bought underwear.  Let’s keep it real.  And you haven’t succeeded in stifling your ambition for books and beer.  You haven’t stopped reading and keep those famous words of Oscar Wilde close to you:  “I’m for beer and plenty of it.”  And you remember another one over at Ernest Hemingway:  “Beer is a food.”  He said it in “Green Hills of Africa”.  I wonder who the last person is that read “Green Hills of Africa”?  So you feel it’s all right.  And you support the economy of your back lane by leaving your empties out there.  Being broke doesn’t mean you’ve lost your passion for philanthropy.  It’s obvious you’re a generous soul.  Let’s take a short break here to have a look at nature’s riches.  There’s that echo again.

RoseObviously it’s wheels within wheels.  It’s poverty explained.  You can get a little burned around the edges and maybe the exposure hasn’t been all that great and there’s nothing but tofu in the house, but in the midst of death we’re in life.  There’s that too.  You can be cancelled financially, but you know what?  You open an account across the street.  Get over there.  You bring in your pennies and you’re helping your country too.  Get those pennies out of circulation.  Your patriotism is unquestioned.

You can tell when people have decent jobs.  They wear decent clothes.  But you’re still a lucky human being if you can see that you are.  And, who knows?  A dump truck full of cash could be right around the corner.  Alexander Pope was right.

Spring
Spring