Christmas Poetry Corner

This Christmas I am sending out
Some presents that, without a doubt,
Should bring some warm and festive cheer
To all the girls I’ve loved this year.

For months I’ve yearned for fair Odette,
But haven’t spoken to her yet.
I sent her my reluctant tongue.
(Removed with pliers; damn it stung.)

I long to kiss Patricia so,
But dare not let my passion show.
For her, with sundry scissor-snips,
I packaged up my puckered lips.

I crave, but could not hope to win,
Sweet nothings cooed by darling Quinn!
I mailed her both my hark’ning ears.
(Detached perforce with clipping shears.)

And how I’d love to marry Rose!
To genuflect and then propose!
In lieu of kneeling, begging please,
I ripped out, wrapped, and sent my knees.

Sabrina’s luscious hips and bust
Can set my loins aflame with lust!
To her I sent my naughty bits.
(Hurrah for home dissection kits.)

At Tracy’s glance, my courage fails:
My tummy fills with swallowtails.
With butcher-blade and packing-foam,
I shipped my stomach to her home.

My gaze is ravished, then subdued
By Uma’s perfect pulchritude!
She got my eyeballs, sheathed in satin.
(Gougings-out take serious splattin’.)

Vanessa takes my breath away!
For her I sigh all night and day!
I sliced right through my solar plex,
And sent my lungs to her, FedEx.

And Wendy! oh to touch, embrace
Her silken skin, her flawless face!
But mailed her both my arms already.
(Hacked ’em off with my machete.)

I worship Xena’s every curve!
Though when she’s near, I lose my nerve.
Such lack of backbone’s quite untoward.
By air mail went my spinal cord.

Yoshiko, how my poor mouth shuts!
I’d call her if I had the guts!
She’ll get my torn-out small intestine.
(Gourmet meathooks I invest in.)

For lovely Zelda, long I pined,
But never did make up my mind.
With chainsaw, clamps, and novocain,
I sent her my benighted brain.

I lie here bloodied and bereft
With just one major organ left.
I’ll leave this rather useless part
To you, dear reader — HAVE A HEART.

*

The first two installments:
Halloween Poetry Corner (2002)
Valentine’s Day Poetry Corner (2003)

Canadian On Paper

Sweet mother of Chupacabra. I am a Permanent Resident of Canada. I have been one since last Friday night. I have woken up Canadian for the past seven mornings, and tomorrow I will wake up Canadian again. Not all the way Canadian, of course. I’m still an American citizen. I have an American accent, American hair, American posture. But I’m more Canadian than I was a week ago, in the eyes of the law. I’m no longer a visitor here, a mere interloper; now I am a fixture, a chronic condition. I may not be full-version Canadian, but I now substantially approach Canadianness; I am asymptotically Canadian. Quasi-Canadian. Canadian on paper. Canadian by contact.

Canadian Immigration deftly threw a red hot howler-monkey wrench into my November schedule by sending over my Permanent Residence approval only four months after I’d sent in my application. It surprised the living shit out of me. I stood in my apartment entryway with the ripped-open manila envelope and uttered numerous litanies of stunned profanity over and over for a little while. I hadn’t been expecting it until the spring. I’d been led to believe it’d take those magical sinister Immigration elves upwards of a year to process. As long as eighteen months, the scary Immigration literature warned. Maybe eight to ten if I was lucky and my paperwork snuck in during a low-traffic window. Yet here was the go-ahead, still in 2005, early November, the timing deceptively precarious: poised on the cusp between fall and winter — to attempt a U-Haul move in full-blown winter at Buffalo/Hamilton latitude is an invitation to pain and suffering — and with a prescheduled week-long trip to the parental homestead in Florida for U.S. Thanksgiving coming up in two weeks, thereby shaving a week and two weekends off what little pre-winter prep/move time was available to me. My options were: a) wait until after Florida and take my chances with moving out in the sadistic cold and possible blizzards of December, b) wait out the winter and move out in the spring, or c) move out right this goddamn instant.

An instant of eight days later, I was in. Nine days later, my possessions were in. The Permanent Residence approval sheet had arrived on Thursday, 3 November. All the following week — last week — I spent in a nuclear frenzy of packing, inventorying, donating, and throwing away. (How excellent it was to throw away so many boxes of old papers and magazines and sentimental junk long since drained of meaningfulness, hoarded tokens of unwelcome memories, so much dead weight, all that useless quote-unquote memorabilia I’d been lugging around for years.) On Tuesday, 8 November, I ascended to the eerie 30th-floor Canadian Consulate office in downtown Buffalo to pick up my immigrant visa. On Friday, 11 November, I landed (this is the term they use for crossing the border with authorization and intent to settle, even though I was driving a car, not landing any planes or boats or hovercrafts) at the Peace Bridge Port Of Entry, spent about fifteen minutes being interrogated by Immigration and roughed up by Customs, and was then officially granted Permanent Resident status. The next day, Saturday (a perfect moving day: warm-but-cool sunny autumn weather), Laura and I U-Hauled my belongings out of Buffalo and over to a sepulchral storage unit near her place in Hamilton, ON. I have been living here with her since then. (In her apartment, not in the sepulchral storage unit.) Yesterday and today it snowed. Tomorrow, Florida.

I have never moved to another country this quickly before.

California Time

San Francisco! Where the streets are paved with tofu, the buildings stuccoed with soy! Where the air has fewer calories and the water better equity! Whose denizens are fitness-crazed half-man/half-cellphone cyborgs, fusion-fueled by Super Burritos and Wi-Fi Chai! Where the sidewalks are soft with lounging hippie bodies in perpetual Learyan tune-in! Where the skies are dark with real-estate buzzards hovering in hunger for the next great quake! Where the wine bars, espresso salons, and hipster haunts are airtight with healthy, wealthy metrosexual youth who never stop snickering at people’s reverence for New York! Where all conceivable races, colors, creeds, faiths, nationalities, sexualities, generations, classes, and faculty ranks live 100% side-by-side in rainbow-brite utopian splendor! Where every other restaurant is a taqueria churning out girthy burritos the size of Yule logs, mortared with organically seasoned free-range beast by-product sunken in grand glops of tangy hydroponic filler paste and monsooned with sauce that will shock the flesh from your bones! Where the hills careen vertiginously up and down in homage to the tech-stock portfolios of yore, for the entertainment of tourists and the swift and disastrous erosion of brake shoes! Where the Muni buses’ gnarled cobweb of crisscrossing power cables blocks out the very sky! Where the BART trains howl metallically in protest as they clank and trundle back and forth under the bay! Where the aspiring best minds of the post-Beat generations hit innumerable open-mic nights wishing to god someone could see them destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked or not! Where the famous fog billows ferociously in from the ocean — pouring like mushroom cloud smoke at high speed down the streets, erasing the terrible red towers of the Golden Gate, on a dime plunging the city into damp gloomy Londonian refrigeration — as if striving to outdo the manmade political fog that has been rolling in from the east this whole past half decade! // The other week I went there, to SF, having never been, and am relieved to have gotten it out of the way.

*

0. The twenty-eight years and eleven months of American life somehow spent without ever once entering the state of California.
1. The three hours gained during the eight hours flying out.
2. The two-hour layover in Las Vegas, during which I ate an unbelievable burrito and tried unsuccessfully to find refuge from the unceasing raygun sounds of the airport slot machines.
3. The century-and-a-quarter between now and when the book I was reading during my flights was written. (Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.)
4. The four weekdays of subtly disorienting double-time-zone existence in SF, telecommuting on East Coast hours with a Pacific-time sun shining through the window. (Online at 6:30am. Lunch at 10am. Quit at 2:30. Dinner at 3. A Pacific second dinner at some point later. Sack out at midnight sharp.)
5. The brief time-travel back to the seventies, eighties, and mid-nineties courtesy of the surreal spectacle of a club full of indie-rock scenesters singing lustily along with Mike Doughty’s winking cover versions of “The Gambler”, “Hungry Like the Wolf”, “Paradise City”, and a few folkified (and sadly de-funkified) Soul Coughing tunes.
6. The uncountable centuries of slow upward and outward growth experienced by the dizzying giant redwood trees that pillared and canopied our hike through Muir Woods and most of the way up Mount Tamalpais.
7. The hour I overslept on the morning of my 10:55am flight home, thus denying myself time for breakfast and seeing to it that the first meal of my day would be a sandwich at Chicago O’Hare at 5:30pm Central.
8. The six hundred years between now and when the book I was reading on my return flights may have been written. (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, circa late fourteenth century.)
9. The three hours lost during the seven-and-a-half hours flying back.

*

I annihilated my feet on the first day thanks to my making the mistake of wearing Chuck Taylors instead of good comfortable walking sneakers during the pedestrian tour of the city my brother and I undertook all afternoon. I seem to make this mistake a little too often. Out-of-shape feet crossed with poor memory recall regarding the necessity of sensible shoes. No doubt my feet would’ve ached no matter what I wore, but the Chucks were disasters; I would’ve gotten better arch support by strapping a slice of Wonder Bread to either foot.

The only other footwear I’d brought along were: 1) a pair of new Doc Marten boots, whose stiff shiny leather was not even close to being broken in; and 2) a pair of ratty disintegrating old hiking boots that I bought for cheap in some mall before I knew better and hadn’t worn since like the Clinton administration (pre-Lewinsky), and which boots had spent probably three or so years in the trunk of my car being repeatedly roasted and frozen at length with the passing seasons.

For my after-work afternoon/evening walking excursions, arranged beforehand, I stuck with the Docs, since they at least offered some palpable support and cushioning; I dulled the new leather’s Achilles-heel-chewing torment with Tylenol. My left foot was not so bad off, but the right foot enjoyed nuclear shooting pain with each step. So on Monday I limped from the Panhandle down to the Mission; on Tuesday I limped around Berkeley; on Wednesday and Thursday I limped around Oakland; on Thursday and Friday nights I limped around San Francisco some more; all day Friday I limped up and down Mt. Tam in those horrid old hiking boots, then left their remains with my brother to dispose of; Saturday I staggered around three airports on shredded gore-spuming ankle stumps.

I am writing myself a note here, for the next time I travel: SENSIBLE SHOES! SENSIBLE SHOES! SENSIBLE SHOES! Don’t let me forget it.

*

50% of this forest is not upright.

Four hours in SF and already I am eating tofu.

The kneeling bus.

The guru of Vietnamese sandwiches.

Imminent ocelots.

Today’s special: whale lard.

I eat only things that hatch.
Even platypuses?

It’s been your pleasure having the three of us aboard.

Beware the wild water pipe.

Chianti by Machiavelli.

Teeth in my pasta.

Clif Bar.

What’d you do in California?
Went to Berkeley and talked about TV!

I think that person just fell out of a plane.

Town, city of gleaming spires! People live here!

Cemetery secondhand smoke.

BART trains’ sketchy easy-chair seat cushions.

The infuriating Dustbuster whine of the accelerating Muni bus.

Driven to tears by a curry crepe.

And I tried to tell you before.
That that’s why I left California.

The name of my band is the name of my name.

He’s Popeye!

This is the girl.

It’s famous for you.

Even my dog done made a fool outta me.

The Blue Yonder

In Toronto we got harassed by the Blue Man Group. Or is it just Blue Man Group, no the. We got harassed by Blue Man Group.

Ten or fifteen minutes into their show, the three Blue Men were hustling around up on stage with their usual frenetic yet stony-faced quasi-alien zeal, engaged in some elaborate antic, something involving the interaction of a hefty glass globe full of red schmutz, an enormous Wile E. Coyote-style rubber-band slingshot stretched from one side of the stage to the other, and a gigantic target that one of the Blue Men held aloft in his hands at stage right;

and just as the other two Blue Men had strained and strained and strained to pull the globe-loaded slingshot back as far to stage left as the laws of physics would permit it to go, and the percussive industrial soundtrack had reached a feverish tempo, and messy catastrophe seemed spectacularly imminent, and the plastic-ponchoed audience’s tension could absolutely build no further;

it was then that the music ground to a halt, the house lights came on, furious klaxons began wailing, the vast television screen suspended at center stage turned blood red and flashed LATE ARRIVALS in huge lettering, the stage-right Blue Man set down his target and testily picked up a handheld floodlight and aimed it at the back of the nearest theatre aisle, and a black-turtlenecked technician with a video camera dashed out on stage and fixed his camera upon the same spot, broadcasting up on the vast television screen the live video image of Laura and me being led down to our fifth-row seats by an usher.

We calmly took our seats with a full-house audience around us apparently losing their shit with laughter, as over the house sound system thundered a cartoony operatic tenor voice histrionically singing You’re laaaate, you’re laaaaaate, YOU’RE LAAAAAAAATE!, while the three Blue Men stood stock-still and glared down through their greasepaint at us.

It was very funny, and of course was not real: we had in fact arrived a half-hour early to the show, and but while we’d been waiting in our seats, a moist-coiffed, yogurty-voiced theatre-assistant weasel had sidled up to us and quietly asked us if the two of us would be willing to take part in an audience participation thing, assuring us that all we’d have to do would be to simply walk from the back of the auditorium down to our seats, that we wouldn’t miss anything, we wouldn’t have to go up on stage, and we wouldn’t get anything on us. We had gamely agreed, despite his too-ingratiating manner and somewhat ominous lack of specifics.

So for the first ten or fifteen minutes of the show we sat in folding chairs in the back of the venue, next to a Thora-Birch-ish usher chickie, where we got to watch the introductory Day-Glo paint-drumming bit and the marshmallow-tossing bit and the paintball-spewing bit and the Cap’n-Crunch-eating bit from a cheap-seats distance, all the while asking ourselves In what possible way would our simply walking from the back of the auditorium down to our seats be entertaining?, until finally in the middle of the slingshot bit the usher motioned for us to get up and stand behind her in the doorway and wait for her cue.

A Spot of Owl

Have for the most part gone off the nighttime coffee in favor of a highly-caffeinated tea named Night Owl. Purchased in Virginia in 2004, only got around to drinking it this summer. Evidently ages OK. A blend of Indian black teas, China black teas, and China white teas, the package tells me. Assam, Pai Mu Tan, etc. Characterized as bracing & bold, but not bitter, which I shall not bother assigning a personality parallel. To me it tastes like spiced dirt. I would be unsurprised to find that it contains actual ground owl, whether of Indian or Chinese extraction. Not to say I don’t enjoy the Owl. I enjoy the Owl. The Owl is loose tea, a sack of coarse crumbly burnt-sienna desiccated bio-grit whose general look-and-feel falls somewhere between bacon bits and miniature mulch, deployed in per-cup batches of two tsps clamped in the mouth of a springloaded Pac-Man-esque tea basket. Noticed a package of the stuff in the background of a scene in Schizopolis a few days ago and became bizarrely excited at this coincidence. Initially I would just nuke a mug of water for a few minutes and then drown the tea basket in it, but have since started in with the whole classic water-boiling thing, replete with tea kettle and kettle whistle (which whistle uncannily seems to hoot when the water first achieves the boil, and outright screeches if ignored for more than half a minute), pouring the scalding hot water into the mug over the tea basket, leaving to steamily steep for five minutes. The ritual of it appeals. Neither milk nor sugar in mine. Nine or ten p.m., usually, and sustains until three.

On Mouse Out

I have carefully drained scottdavidherman.com of much of its color, at least in its lower half. The upper bit is colorful some of the time. Elsewise more or less monochromatic and squintingly low-contrast, I expect it’s almost whited out à la Antarctic afternoons on some screens, especially when viewed in that horrid pallidly bright fluorescent-lit office of yours, on that linty flickery glare-ridden monitor with the zoetropic refresh rate and the ghastly levels of gamma ray bombardment. // I confess I have gone over to the Dark Side and incorporated Flash into this redesign. For the aforementioned colorful upper bit. Rest assured, there is no music, there are no sound effects, there are no bouncy navigation thingies, and there are no flying logos. Nor are there swooping logos. In fact, nothing moves at all. Except for this very small and subtle preloader animation, which your broadband connection’s superfast throughput rate will likely not even give you a chance to discern, if you’re lucky. (Apologies to those few poor, pitiable dialup readers, who will be stuck watching the preloader creep by for the next week.) Other than that one failing, I can promise that the Dancin’ Baloney™ quotient is absolute zero. // And the mousey photo is history. While I enjoyed those two years of giving readers the opportunity to see my fifth-grade self dressed as a dandified rodent, the proverbial bloom was long off the proverbial rose, and the mousey could not but depart. Also, the photo’s May 1988 vintage was an unfortunate reminder that Laura was only three at the time.

The Subterranean Hoss

There is a horse buried in the Royal Botanical Gardens. The horse’s name is Martimas. A race horse. Thoroughbred. Won a famous Coney Island race called the Futurity Stakes at two years old and raked in a fortune in winnings, which fortune the horse donated to the Hamilton General Hospital. The hospital people built an additional wing with it and called it the Martimas Wing. (A bonafide winged horse, some said.) This was a hundred years ago. Martimas accumulated stablefuls of trophies before breakfast, graciously passed his fine equestrian genes along to a number of prizewinning sirelings, and then departed Earth in 1916. He lived large and died at a gallop, aged twenty, the H. sapiens equivalent of sixty. His refrigerator-sized tombstone faces the woods behind the high hedges some yards back from the Scented Garden in the Royal Botanical Gardens’ Hendrie Park, where I happened upon him last Saturday. Martimas stipulated that his stone’s memorial plaque bear a quote from Major G.J. Whyte-Melville’s elegiac tear-jerking poem “The Place Where the Old Horse Died” —

There are men both good and wise who hold that in a future state
Dumb creatures we have cherished here below
Shall give us joyous greeting when we pass the golden gate;
Is it folly that I hope it may be so?

— which plaque also announces, in large letters and with poignant understatement, perhaps to offset the Major’s invocation of dumb creatures, that Martimas was in fact A GOOD HORSE. It is my understanding that Martimas had not actually elected to have the Royal Botanical Gardens as his final resting place — though he might very well not have minded — but what happened was that he was interred on his owners’ farmland estate, and the estate later was bequeathed to Hamilton’s citizens and became the Royal Botanical Gardens, and it was evidently thought best to let the horse stay where he was.

*

I pried off the front grille guard of my desk fan in order to help quell my day-long sneezing fits. Long story. Something to do with the grille’s essentially having turned into a combination dust collector-and-dispenser that enables the fan to send pounds of allergenic dust directly up my nose. Removing the grille is obviously unwise but it is an improvised solution to a long-standing problem. (Dusting this apartment is an exercise in the Sisyphean. Air filtration is in the budget’s Possible column. Antihistamines on a too-regular basis tend to zombify.) I merely have to be mindful when reaching for the fan’s OFF/HI/LO dial to not lift my hand up by more than an inch or I shall gorily julienne my fingers in the blades.

*

My hallway is an actual hallway, a hall way, with substantial length and interior space, as opposed to the sad little floorplan hiccups between bedroom and bathroom and kitchen that constituted my past apartments’ excuses for hallways. This hallway is approximately seventeen steps long, assuming a casual, unhurried, slightly sleepy stride; the count rises or falls accordingly if bags of groceries or an insistent door-buzzer is involved. The hallway is thirty-seven inches wide, i.e. wide enough to carry large items of furniture down, and narrow enough to invite expressively abstract furniture scrapes along the walls in doing so. It is carpeted with a scrubby low-pile carpet with the texture of astroturf and the color of cranberry sauce; judging by style and scent its installation predates the death of Elvis. At either end of the hallway is a thin ridged metal floorplate joining the carpet to the floorboards of the rooms the hallways open into; the floorplates are ill-fastened and bendy and are plainly ravenous for bare toes to stub, skin, slice, jam, and/or break. The hallway is home to my apartment’s smoke detector, CO detector, thermostat console, and the doors to my bedroom, office, and bathroom. The bedroom’s and office’s doors open inward, into the rooms; the bathroom’s opens outward, obstructing the hallway when half open and transforming the inside-door-mounted Charmin roll into the hallway’s sole wall ornament when 100% open. At the hallway’s more-or-less midpoint is a floor vent that permits close-range eavesdropping on whatever sobering building-maintenance conversations are going on between my landlord and the repairman du jour down in the basement. Directly above the vent, fused to the ceiling, is a light bulb housed inside what appears to be a glass cantaloupe, but switching it on always seems pointless and unwelcome, so the hallway remains dark and distantly end-lit and claustrophobic, like a jailbreak tunnel or the world’s worst jetway.

Blueprint

On Memorial Day afternoon, while out driving the back roads that run along the northern edge of western New York, up near the Lake Ontario shore, winding between the lakeside campgrounds and state parks, amid the eerily secluded properties of shrubberied orchards and siloed farms and unlabeled greenhouse compounds and the occasional smokestacked steam-billowing refinery, I am 99% sure that I saw a wild turkey walk across the road and slip into the underbrush. It was pretty far in front of me and was mostly in silhouette, but I am almost certain that that was what it was, given its general proportions and peculiar bipedal walk and robotic neck-strut. I found out later that they are in fact indigenous, though elusive. If it was not a wild turkey, then it was surely a compsognathous.

*

It is while lying on the floor, on one’s back, at night, staring inverted out of two open windows at a series of thunderstorms in progress, absorbing from this perspective the sight of torrential sheets of rain appearing to fall upward into the air, and of lightning-flashes seeming as though flickering grandly below at a great depth, being lulled by the steady whooshes of rainfall striking unseen earth and the intermittent subsonic footprint of thunder approaching or receding; it is while viewing a storm upside-down from the floor in this fashion that one is optimally able to contemplate the satisfaction and comfort of returning wholly to the private life, the closed book, the fond sealing-up of experience and memory, the embracing of the unchronicled, the unremembered, the no-one-but-us-needs-to-know, the keeping of secrets, the return to form; when one imagines the phrase blueprint of the born-again private life, blueprint of the born-again private life rhythmically repeating; and it is once the blood has rushed to the brain and the inner windowsills start to glisten and the once-sweltering summer night air has borne a subtle damp chill through the window screens into the room that one contemplates the willingness to resist satisfaction and comfort, to reconcile the self-effacingly silent with the self-effacingly spoken, to open up enough to spawn secrets worth keeping, and to slam shut the panes before the mildew moves in.

*

Belatedly: Shakespeare predicts Revenge of the Sith title, story points, etc.:

• Thou hast one son; for his sake pity me,
  Lest in revenge thereof, sith God is just,
  He be as miserably slain as I.
  (Rutland, Henry VI Part 3, Act I Scene 3)
• I wonder, sir, sith wives are monsters to you,
  And that you fly them as you swear them lordship,
  Yet you desire to marry.
  (King, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act V Scene 3)
• O monstrous world! Take note, take note, O world,
  To be direct and honest is not safe.
  I thank you for this profit; and from hence
  I’ll love no friend, sith love breeds such offence.
  (Iago, Othello, Act III Scene 3)

Postscript: “This is the second big-budget movie I’ve gone to see within two months wherein a major character is reduced to a limbless torso.” – “Haven’t you heard? Limbless torsos are so hot right now.”

Immigrandependominion Day

So let’s get this straight:

Friday 1 July was Canada Day, aka Dominion Day. (Commemorating, as you know, the date of the formation of the Dominion of Canada via the British North America Act of 1867.)

Monday 4 July was Independence Day, aka The Fourth Of July. (Commemorating, as you know, the date of the creation of the USA via the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.)

Id est, a weekend tidily bookended by both Canada’s and America’s respective birthdays, and thus a proud and patriotic three-day holiday weekend for the inhabitants of of both lands, as well as a de facto four-day thing for American Fellas Who Love Canadian Dames and the Canadian Dames Who Love Them Back. (Canada Day wins though because Fridays off are more fun than Mondays off.)

In addition:

Sunday 3 July was the one-year anniversary of my moving to Buffalo NY, that sepulchral, exhausted, bone-chilling frontier outpost with the ugly mammalian name, the endearing contentment with its geographic and cultural remoteness, and the football franchise with the impressive record of consecutive Super Bowl losses; which city after a year I can’t say I hate but can guess I won’t miss.

Friday 1 July was the two-year anniversary of my unplanned misplacing of my loathsome previous job, an event that with great efficiency and speed erased my life’s savings and my ability to feel the slightest iota of security or trust in any subsequent paid job henceforth, but also helpfully started me down this latest and bizarrest narrative arc in my life, this bit about escaping the South and disappearing into the North. (Assuming one can start down a narrative arc.)

And, on this weekend in particular:

Friday 1 July was the day I got my Canadian Immigration medical exam, as required by immigration rules to prove on stamped paper that I am healthy and fit and adequately lacking in disease enough to enter Canada’s borders long-term. (Blood-drawing, chest x-raying, turn-head-and-coughing, assorted pokings and proddings. All for the low low non-insurance-covered cost of $318.50.)

Saturday 2 July was the day I finally completed the maddening Tolstoyan tome of paperwork constituting the application to be a capital-P capital-R Permanent Resident of Canada, which paperwork includes but is not limited to: a blizzard of sternly worded forms inquiring after facts of all stripe; an FBI fingerprint check of my police record; background info on my family and my education and the organizations I belong to and everywhere I’ve lived and everything I’ve done since I was eighteen; application/processing fees totaling 107% of my latest biweekly paycheck; essays explaining how I met my Sponsor (i.e. Laura) and how our relationship developed and how often we communicate and how often we visit each other and on what dates we did so and why our relationship is Genuine And Continuing; a big fat laboriously-assembled full-color Kinko’d packet of lovey-dovey documentation supplied in response to the application’s demand for hard proof of our relationship (ordering us to provide photos, plane tickets, event tickets, receipts, reservations, evidence of activities attended, long-distance phone bills, letters, cards, emails, gifts, etc., all this intrusive personal stuff short of what pages of the Kama Sutra we’ve attempted so far); as well as the required two statutory declarations — i.e. notarized sworn statements, in this case from Laura’s mother and grandmother — saying that Laura and I have in fact been in a genuine Conjugal Partner relationship for at least one year (since 21 November 2003, as the declarations note), in case the enclosed fusillade of innuendo-slathered love letters, the mini-album of nauseatingly adorable couple-photos, and the mere fact that I voluntarily moved to Buffalo NY to be closer to her weren’t enough.

Monday 4 July was the day we mailed it in.

It remains to be seen as to what day in 2006 they’ll send it all back to us telling us we failed to provide a certain necessary scrap of paper or failed to appropriately fill in a certain blank.

A Millennium of Hemp

The other weekend we went to the Allentown Art Festival. We went into this one artist’s tent to inspect some colorful and interesting-looking paintings — which turned out to be serigraphs, or silkscreened prints — and were rewarded for our enthusiasm with a loud, earnest, increasingly unhinged but not unfriendly jeremiad from the artist himself all about the benefits of hemp-based canvas, about which we had not asked.

“I paint them on hemp canvas, and they’ll last a thousand years!” he yelled at me from ten inches away, his eyes blazing and his neck cords bulging dangerously. He was a wiry, intense, middle-aged hayseed ex-hippie with a face like a hostile opossum, reminding me of an emaciated Jack Nance. “And I’ve been looking into hemp-based paint! That’ll make them last TWO thousand! None of us or any of this shit will be around then, but my art will!” I nodded and made I-see-your-point faces while Laura by all appearances seemed to be chewing her gums off trying not to laugh. After a few more minutes of being barked at about hemp and art and paint-blending techniques and (apropros of nothing) the war in Iraq, I shook the man’s hand and asked for his card and Laura and I beat a very hasty retreat.

The thing I found sort of unbearably funny was that this spazzed-out lunatic’s serigraphs were the most serene art pieces you could ask for: pretty much all smooth, round, tranquil, subtly-gradated tableaux of vast rainbowed sunsets over unrippled water, or cloudless luminous twilit skies over silhouetted woodlands, that sort of thing, and not badly done at all.

Something Scurries

Some new upstairs neighbors moved in last month, into the apartment directly above mine. They are, I believe, the third set of tenants in less than a year. I have not met them and have no plans to.

Like all upstairs neighbors, they enjoy, as often as possible, moving enormous articles of furniture back and forth at ungodly hours in such a way as to maximize bumping, thudding, and floor-groaning. (There are also infrequent instances of maximized bumping, thudding, and groaning of an entirely other variety, conducted in frenzied but lamentably brief bursts, but I do not object to this; in any case it’s possible it’s not even squeaking bedsprings that I hear floating down through my office ceiling, but rather simply a bit of vigorous vacuuming.)

They also burn a stupendously foul type of incense whose smoke somehow insinuates down into my apartment, probably through the [supposedly sealed-up but most likely leaky] flue of the gas fireplace in the front room. I am not opposed to incense in principle but this shit is horse-stunningly noxious. Some sort of sweet-slash-putrescent spiced überstench that makes patchouli seem like Polo.

Anyway, a little while after these upstairs persons moved in, I started suspecting that I was hearing something scurrying around up there during the nights, quite late, like between 2:30 and 3:30am. I never heard it during the day. Whatever it was sounded pawed and quadripedal and swift, dashing back and forth up and down the hallway and into the front and back rooms. I heard no barking and no romping-type canine-ish sounds: this was scurry-only. With a dash of scuffling, scrabbling, and the occasional scampering. Worse, it sounded vaguely heavy.

Naturally, my rigorous scientific training led me to hypothesize that I was hearing the ambulatory signature of a three-foot, fifty-pound rat. Something hideous and leering, with a ravenous Fizzgiggian maw and filthy tenticular whiskers and a horrible seven-foot tail with the slickness of a slime eel and the girth of a zucchini.

Two weeks ago I managed to corner my landlord — who had not, contrary to my suspicions, transformed into a tree back in late January (never mind) — and inquired as to whether the new suckers upstairs had any pets. I answered his bug-eyed blank stare by explaining in so many words that I’d been repeatedly hearing some sort of varmint running around up there in the dead of night, possibly inside the walls or ceiling, and I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be startled out of my beauty sleep by the off-putting sensation of some rodentus maximus ferociously eating my face.

He considered for a moment, then recalled that they had three cats and a ferret. I was satisfied with this answer, though not exactly leaping with relief. A ferret. A fucking domesticated proto-weasel. Not the dreaded Buffalo Wererat after all. It made sense. They presumably keep this ferret caged up all day, then let it out at night, and it tear-asses up and down the length of the apartment in a ferrety spazathon, getting its exercise, working off the Whiskas and stoat chow, fraternizing with the cats, moving enormous articles of furniture back and forth.

What’s strange now is that I haven’t heard the scurrying sounds up there in a while. I think something has happened to the creature. It may be that the heat wave has rendered it lethargic. It may be that neglect has rendered it dead. Perhaps one night the three cats suddenly turned on the ferret and tore it to shreds, à la Actaeon’s staghounds. Perhaps in its haste it scurried pell-mell onto some smoldering incense sticks and promptly barbecued itself. Or perhaps it slithered ill-fatedly into the plumbing (or was dragooned into doing so by unkind owners), failed to reemerge, and so eventually expired somewhere in the pipes; and whose poor corpse is even now being slowly embalmed in toothpaste and assorted expectorations. O theoretical obloquy. (More likely it has just mellowed after the move-in and now prefers less audible locomotion, having graduated to simply slinking. With a dash of skulking, squirming, and the occasional sleeping.)

A Bad Frisbee Throw

Laura and I went to Delaware Park on Sunday afternoon to play frisbee, or at least to practice frisbee. She wanted to work on her throw, since her Ultimate Frisbee league over in Hamilton had just started up again for the summer, and she felt she was out of practice, having been in frisbee hibernation all winter and early spring. I was essentially there as her frisbee-catcher, -chaser, and -returner, useful responsibilities I embraced. The unpleasantest part about playing frisbee, for me, is the wince-inducing length of time between when a badly-thrown frisbee leaves my hand and when it finally hits the ground. This seems to last quite a long time, each time. (With the notable exception of the short bad throws, which just thud ignobly right into the ground, carving up divots of dandeleonine sod and inducing winces in their own right.)

If I were anything approaching a decent frisbee thrower, I would of course largely be able to control whether or not a given throw is good, but in my decidedly non-decent case it’s basically a roll of the dice each time. I don’t know whether it’ll be a good throw until I’ve thrown it. Many aspects of my life adhere to this principle, unfortunately.

A bad frisbee throw is obvious right from the moment of release. I usually launch the frisbee and immediately begin apologizing aloud while it’s still airborne. This then is the part I dislike, when all I can do is stand there helplessly and watch my bad throw sail through the air, arcing way off in whatever wrong direction I’ve sent it. This is especially painful because a bad frisbee throw tends to worsen once it’s in flight. Thrown in the wrong direction, it will inevitably curve away into an even wronger direction. Again, many aspects of my life adhere.

And then once my badly-thrown frisbee has landed at last, way way off to Laura’s left or right, often rolling on its edge an additional several curlicuing yards as a sort of anti-victory lap, I have to sheepishly stand there and wait while Laura, exhibiting Gandhi-like patience, trudges across meadows of grass to retrieve it.

It is a game with a built-in sense of self-rebuke. For us rusty throwers, the frisbee is our own big flat spinning plastic error, which once it leaves our hand we have to embarrassedly stare at whilst it veers and glides and slowly floats back down into conspicuously empty grass. Its air-carried hangtime provides ample time to reflect upon our own sad lack of coordination. With enough trips to the parks I may yet be able to rustle up a modicum of self-respect in my brain’s cobwebby, atrophied frisbee-related motor-skills department, but no one’s holding any breaths.

The Back Spring

It is mid-May and I’ve had to put the heat on; I’m informed that the past several days’ chill is profoundly unseasonable, that even up here in the so-called godforsaken north (albeit the southern north, Buffalo and Hamilton being roughly on latitude with Boston and Milwaukee, hardly tundral, respectably temperate) one can confidently expect pleasant mild sunshiney weather in May, the expected post-thaw array of waving green buds and warm hair-tousling breezes and twinkle-toed battalions of little fluffy clouds that would make the late great Bob Ross’s artistic afro stand straight up in vernal delight. And yet I am sitting here in socks and slippers and an ink-blue waffly thermal knit long-sleever over an earth-tone tee, i.e. layers, basically bundled up, as we move into the second half of May, supposedly the height of spring, the bathwater-warm green renewal before the proper heat of June.

We had a handful of hot days the other week, highs in the high seventies F (low twenties C) when I could open the windows and wear jacketless tee-shirts and walk around on the wood floors barefoot, and later got to listen to rowdy nocturnal bar-goers down the block howling and cavorting amid the sirens and car-horns in the warm echoic city night, weeknights past three — and then the whole proverbial kaboodle plunged back into the cold before the weekend hit, hauling in a long convoy of cold wet gusty days, frost warnings at night, coats and closed windows and the furnaces abruptly back on. On Friday evening everyone’s breath became vapor. The streets again got quietish after midnight. (Or did the cold arrive earlier than that? It may have been more on-and-off than that, now that I consider, mixing and matching the seasonable with the unseasonable during the past several weeks, as April ebbed. I have trouble keeping my weeks straight; they go by with such uncanny velocity.) During these cold snaps the weather bureaus have veered endearingly toward the green of thumb, their online forecast notes appending nighttime frost warnings with advice to locals to move their poor plants inside.

As in the heart of winter, coldness is a burden one can bear with a sense of pride and fortitude: man against the elements, the wintry introspection that shut-in weather affords, the sleek sharp figure I pretend to cut in a wool topcoat, etc. I have been finding myself simply accepting the late-April/mid-May chills with stoic resignation, given that this is my first spring in the area, and by assuming that cold spring weather is just how it happens up here, and is nothing to be surprised at or bent out of shape about: that one must think of the climate up here as calibrated to cold by default, with any deviation from cold requiring extra effort on the part of M. Nature. (Paralleling somewhat, say, the apartment-dweller’s eternal quest for hot shower water from reluctant plumbing.) So it’s not to be minded much, supposedly-unseasonable or no. Anyhow this is my none-too-informed impression and I shall stick with it until disproven by subsequent springtimes.

Delphinus Showoffus

During our boat tour out into Florida’s Charlotte Harbor last Friday, dolphins periodically swam alongside the boat, in pairs, enjoying the froth of the boat’s wake, barreling through the water just under the surface like torpedoes, ten feet or less from the hull, barely seeming to move their bodies but easily keeping speed with us.

At first I kept being a bit unsettled by how yellowish and mottled they looked as they swam, but that must’ve just been the color of the water (our captain informed us that the estuary water we were cruising in was filled with tannins, like the teeth-staining stuff in red wine, lending the water a strange organically darkish tint) and/or the sunlight playing through the wake-roiled water; once they began jumping — and they jumped quite a bit, very frisky, these fellows — you could see when they were in mid-air that of course they were all the slick smooth shiny warm wet-vinyl gray that you expect in a dolphin.

What I thought was interesting and charming was the way one of the dolphins seemed to always propel itself out of the water rolled a bit to the side, belly boatward, so it had one eye on us, checking us out and apparently watching its audience’s reactions up there on the boat. (An assortment of ladies on the upper deck had the habit of shrieking and yelping and hooting excitedly like histrionic game-hens whenever the dolphins did their thing.) This perceptive and attention-craving dolphin’s sideways jump-style resulted in its repeatedly flopping back into the water on its side with a great delphine KER-PLUNK and bonking into the other dolphin that was swimming alongside, which collisions I found endearing. (Dolphins are so damn elegant that it’s refreshing to see them get a little klutzy. ) Impact seemed kind of harsh but the bonked dolphin seemed unfazed.

We saw probably six or eight dolphins (or possibly just the same few over and over again), each pair of which would frolic for us for about a minute or two and would then vanish abruptly — which always felt a little bit like a fluke in the face, like, What, aren’t we humans interesting enough? Wasn’t our wake frothy enough? What did we do wrong? (Though maybe a mere minute or two is appropriate. I’m honestly not sure I’d want to hang out with a dolphin for a whole day or something; things could get tedious. ) There’s a sense of compliment in the fact that wild dolphins actually choose to seek out humans like this, not to be fed or for any sort of greedy survival imperative, but just to play; and I think part of the appeal of these dolphin appearances, besides the straight touristy thing of seeing wildlife up close, is that we almost have to feel honored by the thought that dolphins find us even a fraction as interesting as we find them. And so when they then choose to leave so quickly, part of the inward crestfallenness we feel is probably the realization that dolphins are sort of taking the compliment back.

Our dolphin pals were also conspicuously absent when, on our group’s return trip back across the harbor, after lunch at Burnt Store Isles, our tour boat’s propellor snagged on an underwater crab trap line and kept us stuck dead in the water for a half hour while we waited for a tow-boat. The school of creepy white stingrays I noticed flapping slowly by in formation, just beneath the surface, like ghostly napkins (yes, ghostly napkins), were uninterested in performing. Millions of horrible transparent jellyfish blobs floated by unhelpfully. No manatees showed.