Above: My Flying Saucer. The East River Mountain Tunnel, yesterday, a mile under a mountain between Virginia and West Virginia. Billy Bragg & Wilco on the soundtrack.

Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me. We are back home in ON after our return road trip from FL, driving eight hours yesterday and fourteen today. Long day. A little outinterstated. Above: Shiny Elvis at Steak n’ Shake in Meadville, PA.

Another year, another Yanksgiving. We are in Florida, camped out in the parental manse. It is not hot. I confess to slipping into excessive reveries of weather. Distracted cornily by clouds and palm leaves and the behavior of sun through shutters and the somehow chilling closeness of Jupiter and Venus up in the southwestern heavens, blah blah blah. Somewhere in this house a massive moribund barnyard fowl stuffed with substances is being heated by technology. It has been relieved of noggin and feet and plumage. The scooped-out guts are simmering in a pot of preliminary gravy, along with an eellike detachment of neck. The kitchen’s warmth fans out into the house. Muscular uniformed helmets on TV tackle each other for money. Across America tomorrow’s Black Friday store employees are already asleep, their sorry souls prepared. I am drinking coffee, regrettably diluted into taupeness with milk. (My parents and brother brew coffee here that is straight out of the La Brea tar pits, utterly undrinkable black. They all make merciless fun of me for this opinion.) In a few hours our bird will emerge having evolved into food and will repair to our dinner-table operating theater. Violence will be done to its carcase, tastily. Looking on in horror will be the traditional supporting cast of apple sausage stuffing and mashtates and gravy and veg and cran and cider jello and pumpkin tart and wine and whiskeys. Afterward I am on dishwashing detail. Family members will descend into the pool to digest and sober up and allow their language faculties to return. Tomorrow of course it is leftovers for breakfast and then leftovers for lunch and then leftovers sealed into a battery of Tupperware torpedoes and crammed into the Yaris, where hopefully it will all more or less survive the two days’ worth of highways home.

From the road, again: Brunswickan sentinals outside our interstate-hell hotel.

From the road.

Above: 1:53 video of last night’s snowfall, while out in it, before Chez Tunis’s imposing edifice. (That’s us on floor two. Top floor is the Mad Crumpler.) Fun with lens flares and whip-pans, plus a surprise cameo by a sidewalk Bobcat. Score by Satie.

Snow on the way for later today. Environment Canada, last night: An Alberta clipper over southern Manitoba near midnight will make a Beeline towards Lake Superior Wednesday morning and cross the lower Great Lakes Wednesday night. Snow will spread across the upper Great Lakes overnight and into southern Ontario during the day Wednesday. It will begin near Lake Huron in the morning and reach the Golden Horseshoe towards the dinner hour. — Ruh-oh. The dreaded Golden Alberta Dinner Clipper. The dreaded Midnight Manitoba Beeline. The dreaded Superior Huron Horse.

Not sure I’ve ever eaten Spam. Unknowingly maybe, if it was mixed into my childhood food or school lunches. Spam is on my mind after reading a melancholy NYT piece about it, which piece contains the saddest sentence I have ever read in the Times:

“There are all kinds of people who have an emotional connection to Spam,” said Gil Gutknecht Jr., the former Minnesota congressman, who was in the gift shop at the Spam Museum buying a Spam tie, sweatshirt and earrings.

Spam reminds me of something that Gary Larson writes in The PreHistory of the Far Side, a note about one of his Far Side cartoons — the one in which two alligators lounge blissfully on their backs on a tropical riverbank, arms behind their heads, their bellies visibly full; lying next to them is a shred of shirt, a pair of eyeglasses, and an empty overturned kayak with two enormous bites out of it. One alligator is saying: “That was incredible. No fur, claws, horns, antlers, or nothin’ … Just soft and pink.”

Larson’s note under this cartoon begins: The clear intention of this cartoon was to imply that, for large carnivores, eating human beings must be our equivalent of eating Spam — nothing too difficult about it.

Another Spam thing: I have only recently noticed the existence of a Canadian brand of canned meat, a Spam competitor, with the deathless name of Klik. The two of them sit on supermarket shelves next to each other. Spam and Klik. Klik and Spam. What are the odds that two canned meat brand names would both end up as ubiquitous internet words, at least in the phonetic sense? (Maybe three: There is apparently another Canadian canned meat called Kam, but I don’t know if it’s still around.)

“Klik” is a pretty esoteric name for a processed meat. Does mystery meat really need that mysterious a name? The word “Klik” does not suggest tasty to me. It does not even suggest food. A canned meat called “Klik” makes me imagine nothing so much as the sound of crunching into some hard and unwelcome matter in the middle of a bite of it — an errant tooth, a chip of bone meal, an ossified knot of porcine cancer. A Geiger counter fifty paces from a newly-opened Klik tin? A twitching hoof tapping the stainless-steel floor of a Manitoban pork plant? Perhaps the makers of Klik simply meant to evoke James Joyce — a character in Ulysses describes a pint of stout with: Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.

Food and beer last night at the Pheasant Plucker. Some of the pub’s interior walls are of rough-hewn stone coated with some sort of shellac, giving them the unsavory appearance of oozing wet cave rock. They glisten weirdly. Otherwise cozy place. Bright but not too bright. No distressed wood-beam rafters. Fake fireplace emitting non-fake warmth. Our Heineken and Stella reposing on round cardboard coasters adorned with taglined hockey pucks. Buffalo losing to Cleveland on Monday Night Football, playing on a wall-hung plasma TV crippled by a ghastly green tint. Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” and “A View to a Kill” playing on the house stereo, followed unexpectedly by TMBG’s “Birdhouse in Your Soul” … I have a secret to tell! From my electrical well! It’s a simple message and I’m leaving out the whistles and bells! On our way out we re-notice the microbrew pub across the street called the Winking Judge. We propose to maybe someday have a few there and then trek further downtown for a few more at this one sports bar chain called the Honest Lawyer. Followed by dessert and nightcaps at the Slatternly Paralegal.

Wilde, Earnest:

ALGERNON   What shall we do after dinner? Go to a theatre?

JACK   Oh no! I loathe listening.

ALGERNON   Well, let us go to the Club?

JACK   Oh, no! I hate talking.

ALGERNON   Well, we might trot round to the Empire at ten?

JACK   Oh, no! I can’t bear looking at things. It is so silly.

ALGERNON   Well, what shall we do?

JACK   Nothing!

ALGERNON   It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.

Above: The Peace Bridge, crossing the Niagara River between Buffalo, NY, USA and Fort Erie, ON, Canada.

So I’ve been in Canada now for three years, as of this past Tuesday. My last meal as a U.S. resident was McDonald’s drive-thru. Normally I try to avoid fast food in order to maintain my girlish figure, but I felt this was a good culinary choice for my American last hurrah. This was on the evening of Friday, 11 Nov 2005. Before leaving Buffalo to officially land as a Canadian Permanent Resident that night, I scored some Chicken McDeadlets and fries from the sketchy McD’s on Niagara and consumed them in the car (while parked, I think). From there it’s about two minutes to the Peace Bridge. I drove across listening to Glenn Gould doing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, disc one, track one, Prelude No. 1 in C major. I encourage everyone to employ this piece as your landing-in-Canada soundtrack, when the time comes.

At the border center, inside the big shiny Immigration/Customs compound, the woman behind the glass accepted my paperwork, stamped my travel document, recited a few cantos of helpful information, and then hit me with a grinning “Welcome to Canada!” and sent me on my way. (This welcome was almost as excellent as when Laura’s dad, upon first meeting me in 2003, extended a great burly handshake hand and announced with terrific cheer: “Welcome to THE NORTH!”)

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk:

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep — just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is.

Deadwood:

TOLLIVER   Cy Tolliver, Mr. Wolcott. How do you do, and what’ll you drink?

WOLCOTT   Kentucky bourbon if you got it.

TOLLIVER   Pour Mr. Wolcott a bourbon, Jack … and tell him it’s from Kentucky.

Apparently Michelle Branch’s forthcoming pop-country record has a song on it called “Jack and Jim”. One verse:

Jack wore black and a paper sack
He came from the wrong side of town
But I loved him neat and he tasted sweet
It was hard for me to keep him down

Another:

Jim was a good old Kentucky son
I met when I left Tennessee
There’s nothing at all like a brown-eyed boy
To wash away your misery

The two titular fellows being Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam, in case that’s unclear. Raising the question: If this song ends up being any sort of country hit, will it be good or bad for the Bourbon & Branch? — both the fancy-pants drink I have a weakness for, and the fancier-pantsier Bay Area bar my brother keeps telling me about.