Update on our crumbling city: Above is the remaining half of the hideous empty brick building-husk on Main Street whose other half I got to watch being converted to rubble last summer. The demolition goons finished their work back in the fall, and since then the site has gone quiet. The building has been sitting for months as you see it here, with its several destroyed stories’ east-facing interiors left yawning open to the elements. (The crane visible over the top of the building is on a different construction site one block back.)

I’d been kind of looking forward to seeing how those open stories fared over the winter, whether the Alberta Clippers would scour them clean, whether they’d fill up with snowdrifts, whether Yetis would roost in them, etc., but of course by now we all know that winter in North America has been canceled this year, canceled and rerouted to Europe. Hamilton is due a few more weeks of mild refrigeration and dim winter sunshine and then the spring rains can get down to business at turning those exposed floors into hanging gardens of black mold. Just kidding — I’m sure by mid-spring the building will have been 100% renovated into a gorgeous new office terrarium clad in mirrored glass and leased out to an army of desks and neckties.

Robert Burton: Is not homespun cloth as great a preservative against cold
as a coat of Tartar lamb’s-wool, dyed in grain, or a gown of giants’ beards?

Beer for a snowy evening. In a great big bottle.

Ogden Nash: Besides pollution and erosion / We now must face a goose explosion.

Yesterday I dig out the industrial glue and reconstruct the exploded goose from last weekend. No problem. The cracks are an aesthetic improvement. Am feeling better about 2012 already.

As shown in the first photo above, after I reduce the number of pieces from twenty-six down to two, and am all set to close up the bird for good, I inscribe a message to future goose-breakers (most likely me) inside the tail, along with the dates of breakage and repair. How often does one get a chance to write on a sealed object’s inside surface? To hide a quote-unquote Easter egg inside a bird? At the time this seems clever, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t done it — I feel like from now on whenever I see the goose around the house I’m always just going to think of the concealed message inside it. I can see this eventually bothering me. It’s possible I’ll have to re-break the bird so I can blacken the writing out.

Also: Somehow I’m reminded of that old, bad Groucho Marx joke (though it involves the wrong animal): Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Department of Bad Starts: Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve I accidentally drop a full champagne flute on the floor. And on New Year’s Day I accidentally knock a vintagey folk-art ceramic goose off a table onto the floor. Both items fight the concrete and lose. Better them than me. Fragments of shallow symbolism fly all over the place and have to be carefully swept and vacuumed up. The goose ends up in twenty-six grabbable pieces and can probably be glued back together. Maybe if I leave a few pieces missing I can drink champagne out of it.

Well, Xmas happened on schedule and I have emerged on the other side of it. Have you?

Today is Back To Work Tuesday for us unfortunate cogs who don’t get the whole holiday week off. To celebrate, this evening here in Hamilton we get a dose of snow disguised as rain. The season’s first snowfall and it’s nothing but a low-energy mitten-soaker, adding some extra blah to the slough of deadness between holiday weekends. (A Special Weather Statement for our area cautions that there may be a flash-freeze overnight, which bodes darkly for tomorrow morning’s unfortunate-cog commute. Speaking of deadness.)

In Measure for Measure, Lucio describes Angelo as: a man whose blood is very snow-broth. Yeah. Snow-broth. A slightly silly Shakespearean way to say ice water, but it strikes me as the correct name for the stuff that falls out of the sky in this sort of not-quite-freezing winter weather. Tonight’s snow-broth spends a few hours raining straight down, without wind, a steady shower, all business, thudding wetly on the window panes and glazing the sidewalks in an insipid slush reduction, accumulating zero.

I get the above photos when I go out walking to return a library book and to get a closer look at the downtown holiday lights before they’re taken down. I stop by the big Xmas tree in front of City Hall and circle the other big Xmas tree in Gore Park and pace back and forth under the canopies of the park’s strung-up tree-branch lights. Weather spatters my glasses and camera lens, saturates my hat. The snowy air and rainy pavements make all the lights’ glows bleed in a pretty and melancholy way, though I suppose they were already doing the pretty-and-melancholy thing well enough on their own these past two days, being holiday lights still up after the holiday’s over and gone, lingering, looking all post-jolly, after-merry, ex-festive, etc.

Above: We not only drove into the South — we drove into the future. (Photo by Laura!)

So who won? Road or Car? Well, we do not drive off the road and die, and we suffer no car trouble, and we meet with no bad weather, and we make decent time. We travel new routes and do not get lost. We stop to visit relatives and do not seem to visibly offend them. We eat OK road food, listen to ass-kicking road music, sleep in comfortable hotels, shock our lungs with the invigorating country air of ten states and the vitamin-enriched exhaust fumes of a dozen or so interstates. We drive over rivers and under mountains, past snowy pastures and down palm-lined parkways. We consume leftover Thanksgiving stuffing in the car at 80 mph. We resist road fatigue by taking turns at the wheel, eating chocolate-coated coffee beans, and drinking cup after inky black cup of gas-station ghoul-coffee. We see and do things that lazy writers love to describe by resorting to excessive anaphora and a wearying abuse of the first-person plural.

So … it seemed to have been a good time, a fine trip. Technically, Car defeated Road. Having said that, though, I feel in a more general, experiential sense that Road may have won after all. I’m haunted by something I said three weeks ago: that we’ve been fortunate enough to have had our Yanksgiving drive always seem to be: a fun, safe, pseudo-adventurous novelty, rather than an exhausting, soul-annihilating, life-and-limb-threatening slog across a country that sometimes never seems to want to end. “Rather than”? No. This trip was both things.

The fun pseudo-adventurous part was the drive down to Florida, when we spread the drive across a number of days, only going eight or nine hours per day, mostly in daylight. It’s fun! It’s vacation! You travel toward warm weather and crazy people! You check into a hotel at dinnertime then eat and drink and chill out! You drift off to sleep in your starchy hotel sheets with thoughts of exploration, wanderlust, possibility!

The soul-annihilating slog part was the second and final day of driving back to Ontario this past Saturday. It is a little too fresh in my mind right now. The thing of having been driving for eight hours and staring at like seven-plus more hours to go, and the sun has just gone out and now we’re in darkness and stuck on that bleak, purgatorial, never-ending stretch of I-79 snaking out of the mountains of northern West Virginia, creeping for hours up to the outskirts of grimmest Pittsburgh, then inching across the vast desolations of northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie, then crawling for lightless miles up I-90 toward Buffalo, then finally that last gasping hour over the border to Hamilton … it goes on forever. We get home after midnight but to us it’s been midnight for hundreds of miles. The next day my mind is gelatin and my body is cement. There is some Einsteinian general-relativity shit going on on that I-79-to-I-90 route at night, some serious bad-news bending of space-time, where dashboard clocks and odometers and human body rhythms do not operate by normal Earth rules. We may actually still be driving there, and it may only be a highway-delirium fever dream that I’m typing this.

OK, Road. You win. Our loser punishment is that next November we must fly. (Or maybe, Scott, you unbelievable idiot, you should just split the next drive home into three days so you can have more of your magical country air and starchy sheets and la-di-da dreams of possibility and “fun” and then arrive home on Sunday in what passes around here for daylight.)

Above: A recently-opened mason jar of aged homemade BBQ sauce from a gas-station/BBQ joint in ruralish central Pennsylvania called Gio’s Roadside Grille. It is aged because we bought it at Gio’s in November 2008 (!!) during our Yanksgiving drive to Florida, and god only knows how long the sauce had been in the jar when we bought it. The jar has remained sealed and untouched these past three years in two different pantries, the one at Chez Tunis and the one here at the Hotel Fantod. Last night I finally pop the seal and open the jar to see if there’s any chance the stuff is still edible and has not rotted into a hideous putrefied ooze. It tastes fine, familiar, pleasantly lacking in rancidities, corruptions, or microbial befoulments. The two of us then consume half the jar’s contents, heated up, over plates of of local BBQ smoked pulled pork takeout and here on Sunday we are still alive and upright and feeling unpoisoned … so far. The ancient occult technology of mason jar food preservation appears to have served us well. The label shows no expiration date, just a command to Refrigerate after opening, which I obey.

The sauce, if I’m not mistaken, is done in the Eastern North Carolina BBQ style: thin, tomato-based, with vinegar and mustard and Worcestershire sauce and brown sugar and molasses. It’s entirely possible that if such a combination of ingredients did rot into a hideous putrefied ooze, we would not be able to tell. On reflection, also, it does seem a little strange to happen upon a BBQ joint in the PA backwoods that not only has outstanding southern BBQ, but whose sauce adheres to the Eastern NC recipe. Or maybe this isn’t surprising at all? What do I know. — The main mystery is how the chillaxing fireproof pig on the label keeps that glass of lemonade cold.

Speaking of hungry Toronto horses: Above is a small, weird, ugly ornamental corbel seen at Casa Loma that appears to be depicting 1) a spectacularly gruesome jousting mishap, 2) a wince-inducing session of medieval horse-dentistry, or 3) an intervention-minded war-pony forcibly dissuading its smirking, flinty-eyed clean-freak master from Dustbustering his own fucking foot.

Another October nineteenth. This year I turn thirty-five. Here is a recent photograph of me looking revoltingly smug while a Torontonian bistro-horse devours my brains.

Sunday evening: A skeptical Laura throws a long shadow across scrap-paper Nijinsky’s kneecap. (Memory jog: Those are the Bogusławski posters described two Marches ago.)

One month ago today we are on a Lake Huron beach, suntanning. This is a different Great Lake suntanning session than the previously-mentioned one, the one on Lake Erie over Labor Day weekend. Lake Erie is nice. Lake Huron is kind of nicer. The two suntanning sessions are basically the same except that on Lake Huron we sit facing facing west instead of south (thus getting a more even afternoon tan), and we are there a little longer, and also there are sandwiches. The sandwiches are homemade and fresh and accompany us in a small cooler. We wolf them down mere moments after sitting down on our beach towels, which are bath towels. At the Lake Erie beach we feel keenly the absence of sandwiches. It is a mistake we will not make again. Cold sandwiches on the beach are the best. Lake Huron is also bluer of sky and water than Erie, and louder of surf — a pleasant lacustrine low roar keeping aural pace with the more upper-register low roar of beachgoers’ voices. A lulling white noise conducive to reading and sunning. It seems a world away from the green-grey and waveless Lake Huron we stare into two springs ago. This beach is one of several beaches in Pinery Provincial Park. Cape Coddish long-grassed sand dunes wall off the beachfront from Pinery’s namesake forests. The name Huron, as in both the Great Lake and the Iroquois peoples formerly living near it, derives from a French word meaning rough hair of the head, presumably from seventeenth-century French explorers’ and fur-traders’ insulting description of the tribespeople they met. We chase our sandwiches with cans of Coke that despite the cooler’s coolness have been long approaching lukewarmth and emerge from the cooler exuding beaded films of condensatory science. It has been about a three-hour drive west across southern Ontario to Pinery. Ever look at a map of Ontario? It is staggeringly immense, most of it uninhabited. Southern Ontario is like a tiny appendage of Ontario’s total Ontariority and this tiny appendage still takes three hours to drive across, Lake to Lake, unless of course you’re a road-trip spoilsport and you take the multilane arterial highways instead of the scenic rural roads. We vegetate in the Lake Huron sun until evening and then hit Grand Bend for a sunset dinner out and then drive a multilane arterial highway home in the dark, chewing coffee beans with chocolate chips and screaming along with ghastly Beatles tribute-band tracks to keep from nodding off. Below: That day’s Great Lake late-summer sundown.

Above: Swaying swing-stage ropes and cables on our building, two weekends ago, as viewed while leaning backward out a window and looking up. (Just kidding. Actually looking down.)

Yesterday: Mid-air goons on a swing-stage scaffold, floating past our windows.

Above: Lake Erie, Long Point Provincial Park, end of the day. Photo by Laura.

Last Saturday, Long Point, looking south over Lake Erie’s pond-ripple surf and alien horizon-haze, I sit with Laura in the sun, toes in freshwater sand, suntanning our faces, suntanning our limbs, suntanning our backs and bellies, perspiring in unison, beach books in hand, she reading about magicians, me reading about John Steinbeck putting small sea animals in jars, basically filling up at the last minute on whatever light and heat and outdoor oxygen is left of this summer because I can see the future and I know what the weather is dying to do.