Longtime readers may remember the Sixty Dollar Bear, the pueblo clay bear curio I am mysteriously compelled to purchase while in Albuquerque in 2002, and which lives on my desk. It is shown above on the right, staring down the new friend we buy for it in Ucluelet, a small polished nubbin of cast aluminum also faintly suggestive of the ursine shape. I believe we are calling it the Ukee Bear. (Ukee apparently being the locals’ affectionate nickname for Ucluelet.) It did not cost sixty dollars.

My blind PowerBook is not a laptop anymore. It is now an uglified Mac mini. It turns out that replacing its dead LCD is too expensive for me to even bother. Instead I buy a 20″ Apple Cinema Display and a keyboard, which cost less than the LCD repair job would have, and which I like a lot better. I hook them up to the PowerBook so as to operate it as a desktop box. Portability be damned. This big bright happy widescreen display draws me to it like a moth to a candle. The PowerBook itself now sits off to one side of my desk, out of the way, working from the wings, its display in long-term Sleep mode (Coma mode?), cables spouting from its sides. We’ll see how long this Frankensteinish setup works out. What will break next?

To my Ideal Reader: a happy xxiii.

Finally: The Under the Volcano Criterion DVD drops on 23 October. A belated birthday gift. There is no way this thing won’t disappoint me after all the anticipation. Awesome cover.

Dave McKean’s 3.5-hour Keanoshow short films DVD, out next week. (If any other McKean fans are reading this: Anyone interested in taking over Dreamline?)

David Fincher directing Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama for 2009? I thought that rumor died years ago. Now it’s back on? Do I have to dig that old paperback out of the box in the closet? (Yes.)

What also stays in my mind during the trip is something David Foster Wallace writes in his “Consider the Lobster” essay, about how being a tourist is: to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you.

Case in point being our stays in Tofino and Ucluelet, BC, small coastal towns whose appeal is largely their feeling of being out in the wilderness, remote, in a picturesque yet severe series of landscapes. All the hotels in the area, including the two we stay in, attempt to emulate rustic cabin environments, to make soft white-collar suckers like us feel temporarily rugged and earthy and secluded, while still being five minutes away from fancy restaurants and fish-&-chips joints and organic grocery stores.

Our presence as tourists in Tofino and Ucluelet has a particular oddness, since the vast majority of the other tourists we see are rich-looking old people or big loud families, and for the most part the only people our age (20-30-year-olds) we see there — who aren’t itinerant backpackers or surf rats, anyway — are the restaurant employees and hotel staffers and shop cashiers, many of whom I swear keep giving us curious what are you doing here looks. (This is probably just my imagination, though, the result of selective observation and dumb tourist guilt. No doubt they harbor the exact measure of indifference, resentment, or outright guts-hatred toward us as they do toward any other of our fellow out-of-town intruders.)

“As a tourist,” Wallace laments, “you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

On a more positive note: We are pleasantly surprised to find that one of the most prevalent cuisines in the area (next to seafood) is awesome burritos. Who knew?

A few of Laura’s photos from the trip. Those crows were everywhere. Very Hitchcock.

The Tempest is one of the books I bring along on the trip. Just for the vague correspondence of locales. Takes place on an island, we’re vacationing on an island, etc. But another vacation parallel shows up: Caliban’s remark about luggage:

The dropsy drown this fool! What do you mean
To dote thus on such luggage?

Actually, Shakespeare uses the word luggage here to just mean junk — unnecessary stuff one literally lugs around. Even though we travel pretty light, Caliban’s lines haunt me throughout the week, as we lug our luggage through parking lots and up and down steps, hoist them into the trunks of cars, wait for them while negotiating ruthless baggage-claim crowds, and of course repeatedly unpack and re-pack them in Tofino, Ucluelet, Victoria, and at home. Such luggage. Such luggage! To dote thus on such luggage. What do you mean to dote thus on such luggage? — I don’t know.

William Hazlitt: There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things — books, pictures, and the face of nature.

Scenes (and notes) from Vancouver Island. »

We are off to the west coast of Vancouver Island. A cool and rain-drenched week of mountains, beaches, forests, wildlife (encounters with, and dinner entrées of), possibly some outdoorsy wandering around, and probably a lot of staring out into the chilly Pacific. Also wine, books, and utter internet silence. Did I mention rain?

Sebald, from The Rings of Saturn:

I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass, the flounder rise or the cod come in to the shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

Addenda to the Joubert: Will writes in with May Swenson’s line from “How to Be Old”: Youth is given; age is achieved. Tonight, reading Michael Dirda’s Book by Book, this apothegm by Goethe: We learn only in old age what happened to us in our youth.

My accursed three-year-old G4 PowerBook, not content to merely hit me with total hard drive death last year, has now gone blind. The LCD spends the past several weeks dimming and flickering horribly and then this morning goes 99% dark. Good thing we’re going on vacation on Friday; starting tomorrow the machine can spend a nice leisurely week at the repair shop being tortured by service techs, having its backlight bulb replaced or whatever its affliction is. (Rage, rage, against the dying of the backlight — god I’ve been waiting so long to use that joke.) What a bastard. Couldn’t it have waited till October, when the new Leopard MacBooks start shipping?

A few weeks ago we watch the eighties cult classic Repo Man. Neither of us have ever seen it. After hearing it widely referred to by its many fanatical devotees as one of the greatest and most quotable movies in all of cinematic history, I am let’s just say underwhelmed. Like all low-budget cult flicks, it seems like it can only really be appreciated if one watches it 1) when it’s still new, 2) at an impressionable age, 3) in a room full of people who already know the movie by heart and take great pleasure in reciting every line along with it, and/or 4) while galactically drunk or baked. Our viewing of it, unfortunately, is none of the above.

What gets me curious enough to see it in the first place is when my interest is piqued by the following quote from it — Tracey Walter’s spaced-out mini-monologue about coincidences, a subject near and dear to my heart:

A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don’t realize that there’s this like lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean. Suppose you’re thinking about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly someone’ll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o’ shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconciousness.

I happen upon this quote on a Saturday. I get the DVD a few days later, during the week. We watch it the following Sunday. (And yes, we catch the subsequent Plate O’ Shrimp shot.) It is on the Friday between that it occurs to me that I actually do order a plate of shrimp while we’re out to dinner on Thursday, not even thinking about the Repo Man connection at the time, bizarrely oblivious to my having waltzed into a blatant recursive coincidence — a coincidence that itself has to do with a famous reference to coincidences. (In my defense, the dish I order is not actually called Plate O’ Shrimp. It’s some sort of Mexican Shrimp Special. Very tasty.)

From the Department of Should-I-Be-Worried: Several times within the past few weeks I think I see snow falling outside the windows. Maybe just out the corner of my eye, momentarily glimpsed through the blinds or curtains. It is not wishful thinking. Despite the fact that, outside, we may currently enjoy all-day temperatures in the ninety-somethings Fahrenheit, brain-basting humidity that flash-curls hair and transforms underthings into shrinkwrap, and a terrifying daily UV-index number with which we may conveniently calculate how much skin cancer the ochre-hued sunshine renders unto us per solar lux, all veiled in an omnipresent cloud of mercifully death-hastening steel-city pollutants that the lake breezes never stop wafting inland from the factory-choked waterfront. It is paradise. Imaginary snowflakes don’t persuade me. My subconscious only thinks it yearns for winter. It doesn’t really.

I can only hope that Joseph Joubert made his exercise/food comment in general, with his own youthful days in mind as well, as opposed to curmudgeonishly directing it toward the young people of 1800. (He would have turned 46 that year. Would the 60- and 70-year-old scholars of his day have thought the same thing about him?)