TO FLORIDA FOR THE WEEK
See you on the flip side.

PS. Read Popscratch; I recommend it.

HUMDRUM
Sorry. Have been temporarily in hiding after being profiled in the paper. (Local prominent blogger neither particularly prominent nor really a blogger. Discuss.)

There has been some snow. Not a lot, just a sort of phoned-in thing. A few inches that fall, sit prettily for a stretch whilst the schools cancel themselves and the roadside ditches fill up with SUVs, and then up and melt perfunctorily. Winter arrives today but seems already a bit distant. The house where I now live has oil heat, which involves 1) something ancient and heavy mechanically humming away somewhere downstairs, and then 2) each room’s wall-hued radiator silently turning things toasty. Whenever I am out in the cold and feeling especially chill-bitten I repeat to myself: Canada practice, Canada practice.

I hit the third and final LOTR midnight sneak back on the sixteenth. It was good. It’s been forever since I read the book but it all came back to me. Aragorn meets the Architect and Treebeard goes after Trinity and Agent Smeagol learns to copy himself and the Nazgûl finally tunnel through to Zion and Legolas does more of his trademark 360° arrow-time FX shots and then it’s Mithrandir versus the Merovingian while the scenery-devouring H. Weaving remains in top form as always. Plus there’s the thing with Frodo and Sam encountering Tony Shalhoub at Cirith Ungol. (Think the sound boys went a bit overboard with the Wilhelms.)

FREE MUMAKIL
The other week I made this up and sent it to a Californian friend of mine (intuiting correctly that she occupied that rare intersection of Tolkienophile and liberal-activist type and so would get the doubly-obscure not-all-that-funny quote-unquote joke) and to my delight what does she do but print the thing out and post it on telephone poles around Berkeley. The movement starts here, comrades.

FRICTION

I
Peace Bridge, Ft. Erie, ON.
Friday 21 Nov 2003, around 1pm.
I pull my car up to the border crossing booth.
I don’t have a passport, so I hand over
my driver’s license and birth certificate.
The official in the booth takes them. He looks like
George Wendt as Bill Swerski from SNL’s Super Fans.
Sunglasses, caterpillar mustache, fat, no neck.
He exhibits your basic hard-ass meathead mien.

—Destination.
—Hamilton, Ontario.
—Been to Canada before?
—No.
—This is your first time?
—Yes.
—How long you staying.
—Until Monday, so four days.
—Purpose of your trip.
—Visiting a friend.
—Male or female.
—Female.

Vaguely disdainful pause

—How do you know her.
—From the internet.

He looks at me like I am the scum of the earth

—Is she expecting you?
—Yes.
—Where you staying?
—I have reservations at a motel.

He looks at me like I am the trail of slime
the scum of the earth might leave behind it

—Place of residence.
—Charlottesville, Virginia. United States.
—What do you do there.
—Web design.
—Do you have your computer with you?
—No.
—Any firearms, alcohol, fruits and vegetables?
—No.
—How much money is in the car.
—I don’t know, maybe fifty bucks.
—You drove all the way from Virginia?
—Yes.
—How long a drive is that?
—Like eight hours or so.

Long pause

—OK, just pull your car in over there and give this to the Immigration desk.
—Thanks.

He hands me back my license, certificate, and a yellow
half-sheet form in whose boxes he’s written my answers;
halfway down is scrawled in large, ominous letters:
MEETING INTERNET FRIEND

II
I park my car and go into the building.
The diminutive, dark-eyed woman behind the glass
at Immigration looks like Geddy Lee in lipstick.
I hand the yellow form through the glass to her.
She stares at the form, then looks coldly up at me.

—Purpose of your visit.
—Meeting a friend.
—Male or female?
—Female.

She looks at me like I am the scum on the
underside of the scum of the earth’s shoes

—Is she expecting you?
—Yes.
—How do you know her?
—From the internet.

She looks at me like I am the week-old scum of the
earth that the fresh scum of the earth just ate

—What’s her name?
—Laura Joldersma.

Her face registers 100% incomprehension,
as if I’ve just uttered an oath in Old Norse

—What.
—Laura … Joldersma. J-O-L-D-E-R … um, S … M … A.
—What’s her phone number.
—///-///-////.
—Have a seat.

To my surprise, she appears to actually be calling
the number to confirm with Laura that I’m expected.
Of course, Laura is at work right now, not at home.
About five minutes pass while Geddy finds this out

—Mr. Herman.
—Yes.
—I’m getting no answer at this number.
—Oh. Do you want to try her work number?
—She’s at work?
—Yes.
—What does she do.
—She works for a hospital.
—What’s the number.

Rather than read the number, I pass my handy
phone-number scrap of paper through the glass;
she immediately dials the number and extension,
then waits, gradually grimacing into the phone

—No one’s picking up at this number either.
—Oh. She must be away from her desk.

I become aware as I say this how unconvincing it sounds,
even though it is lunchtime-ish (around 1:30pm) and thus a
perfectly plausible time for one to be away from one’s desk

—Are you getting her voicemail?

She nods; there is a long pause as she presumably listens
to the voicemail greeting; she opts not to leave a message,
but just hangs up and looks at me expectantly; I shrug

—Well … those are the only phone numbers I have, so.

Another pause, lengthy and fraught with mutual
annoyance; we stare at each other through the glass,
brick-faced, having reached something of a standstill

—Have you contacted her recently?
—Yes, I spoke with her last night.

She regards me balefully, then rolls her eyes,
sighs with bureaucratic weariness, stamps the form
with something denoting approval, and hands it to me

—You can go. Have a nice day.
—Thanks.

III
I go back outside and hand the yellow form to one of the
Customs thugs lurking boredly around in the parking lot.
He doesn’t look like anybody.

—Purpose of your trip.
—Visiting a friend.
—Male or female.
—Female.

This official must have missed the Canadian government’s
compulsory class on leveling scum-of-the-earth expressions
at border-crossing lotharios like me, since he barely bats an
eye at this answer, and even seems to nod a bit in approval

—You met her online?

He is glancing down at the yellow form, reading Swerski’s
aforementioned three-word summation of my itinerary

—Yeah.

Again with the lack of scum-of-the-earth looks;
clearly this guy won’t be with Customs for long

—Can you pop the trunk for me please.

I open the trunk, which is empty; he authoritatively
massages and thumps the trunk floor a few times

—Stand over there please.

He looks in the back seat and goes through my travel bag,
rummaging through my clothes and perusing my varieties
of hair care products and personal grooming schwag

Satisfied, he then moves to the front seat and goes
through my other travel bag, examining my books,
my printed-out directions, and my CD binder

I become alarmed that he may confiscate the open bag
of semi-sweet chocolate chips (“morsels”) that I’ve been
munching on for much of the drive up, for the sugar high

—See you later.
—Thanks.

I get back in the car and find to my relief that the morsels
are still there, but that they’ve been dumped out all over
the inside of my front seat travel bag. Fucking Canucks.
(Except you, lovey)

ON A RELATED NOTE
Strike Wednesday’s complaint. After a bit more practice, the problematic two measures’ parts have clicked and are now playable, nothing to it. (The piece is S. Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”, for any non-music-readers who may be looking in.)

LEAF

These two measures have been giving me trouble. They’re not difficult, note-wise. No virtuosic turbo-tuplets or ligament-annihilating arpeggios or draconianly knotted contrapuntal noodling. Just octaves and your basic Joplinian syncopation. Technically, I have the music down pat: I can play each hand’s part separately without any problem, at slow or fast tempi, without looking at the score or the keys while playing. The trouble is that, during just the above two bars, I become incapable of playing both hands’ lines at the same time. Something about the sound, or the rhythmic or harmonic interaction, or the sensation of my arms and hands and fingers moving in such a way, throws me off. My concentration goes to pieces, and one or both hands’ parts dissolve into clumsy key-whacks. It’s extraordinarily frustrating. My fingers know where they’re supposed to go, but they’re impeded by some sort of mental obstacle I have yet to overcome. Am out of practice at practicing.

TEMBLOR

Also: this afternoon we experienced a magnitude 4.5 earthquake. This was my first earthquake. I’d somehow managed to miss the area’s previous major seismic events — one last May, another a few Septembers ago — but this one got my attention. The floor did its trembling bit, the walls and windows did their rattling bit, the tiny glass flower vases did their locomotion-across-tabletops bit. The sound of it was low and wide and deep and encompassing; the word rumble is a sorry faute-de-mieux stand-in. // Central VA’s days are numbered. The quakes of late are getting larger and more frequent. Surely the earth is gearing up to split grandly open and swallow up the whole region any day now. Would nonetheless be compelled inexorably toward each other over time. Until the inevitable moment when.

MUCH HAPPY FUN
Everything and More is some fairly slow going for me personally, being that it’s my favorite author (D. F. Wallace) writing about my least favorite subject (Hofstadterianly abstruse advanced math), and so my whole usual pore-over-the-witty-prose thing mixed with my reread-over-and-over-again-until-it-makes-a-lick-of-sense thing doesn’t exactly lend itself to speed-reading. An artifact of this pace is that I have adopted a reasonably persistent mental association of the book and the book’s subject matter (i.e., ∞) with the potentially limitless consumption of Chinese food.

For some weeks now this book has accompanied me on weekend afternoons to my local Chinese all-you-can-eat lunch buffet of choice. I sequester myself in a booth for an hour or two and graze on plates heaped haphazardly with rice and noodles and chicken and vegetables and other material, and I prop the book up with my left hand and continue working my way through its text, slowly turning its pages and staring with furrowed brow at the diagrams and equations and Wallacian syntactical back-flips, absently bringing forkful after forkful of food to my mouth.

The setting is appropriate, as the restaurant’s lateral walls are entirely mirrored, reflecting off each other, and thus from certain angles give the illusion of an infinitely vast seating area (albeit with a curving regressive line of infinite Scotts peering creepily back at me).

Also, my receiving a primer in the mind-expanding mathematical concepts of infinity dovetails well with my physically being internally notified over the duration of that hour or two, with increasing insistence, that my own stomach’s boundaries are all too finite.

(I can usually only take two buffet plates’ worth, plus maybe a tiny dessert plate of cake and Jell-O. My relatively meager buffet appetite tends to mirror my overleisurely reading rate. I am continually put to shame by peers who read voraciously and blaze through every book they read in a matter of hours or days, much in the same way as I am shown up by the other buffet patrons around me at the Chinese restaurant, many of whom are nearly spherically obese and seem to have no problem inhaling the food off their stacks of plates as fast as the help can refill the buffet bins.)

The fortune cookie today told me, simply, cryptically:
The job is well done.

OBTAINED
during the past week and a half of traveling by car up and down the continent (in no particular sequence):

PUNTA GORDA, FLORIDA: roughly my own body weight in turkey, stuffing, mash’tates, graviness, cranberriness, cider-gelatinousness, Cool Whip w/ pumpkin pie somewhere beneath it; a variety of coffees, wines, champagnes, and mixed drinks over two days and three nights; restaurant-prepared eggy-weggplant parms & breaded grouper fingers; the experience of drinking Merlot from a wineglass while 90% submerged in a swimming pool; two bags of (Lord have mercy) dark chocolate Hershey Kisses; plastic-containered leftovers swaddled in Ziplocked ice & stashed in an Igloo Playmate in the trunk for the long trip home

ATLANTA, GEORGIA: eggy-weggs over easy & buttered grits & toast w/ various jellies & something like seven cups of aggressive black coffee between 11pm and 2am at the Majestic Diner on Ponce (on Ponce being the initially snicker-inducing Atlantan term for any location on Ponce De Leon Ave., downtownish), talking with A. and having to make a concerted effort to not let her Southern twang creep into my own speech by like osmosis right from the very get-go

HAMILTON, ONTARIO: Tim Horton’s black coffee & soup & sandwich (no doughnut or bread bowl, I know, I know); homemade shepherd’s pie; American restaurant-chain pizza & pull-apart cinnamon roll; an approximate understanding of the conversion rates of miles/kilometers, Fahrenheit/Celsius, US$/CDN$; a spectacular purple-black vertical line of a hickey over my starboard sternocleidomastoid & trapezius that for the whole week afterward made me look like I’d had my neck slammed in a car door

IN TRANSIT: 3000+ miles on the odometer; two tiny cracks in the windshield; unfathomable cumulate full-body car-lag; moderate amusement from the following names of places I drove through or by:

• Withlacoochee Bay, Florida
• Mullet Key, Florida
• Experiment, Georgia
• Bottom, North Carolina
• Toast, North Carolina
• Gross Junction, Virginia
• Forks of Cacapon, West Virginia
• Blue Knob, Pennsylvania
• Burning Well, Pennsylvania
• Challenge, Pennsylvania
• Kill Buck, New York
• Winger, Ontario

… and road-weary empirical proof of the somewhat disarming geographical Fun Fact that Charlottesville, Virginia is closer to Hamilton than it is to Atlanta.