The Road to Halifax

On the CAT, we met this dapper fellow, Georg.  He was a traveler from Germany who was in a similar fix as us: he needed to somehow get the 300+ kilometers to Halifax from Yarmouth.  Trains did not begin until the other side of the province.  We had prepared to hitchhike.  A taxi of some kind would cost like fifty or sixty bucks. Plus, hitchhiking seemed fun, but Georg had never done it and did not speak English well.  Mark devised a plan to hitchhike with Georg to his cousin's place in Halifax and then maybe she would let us crash there for a night.  Genius!

The only problem was that they detained Mark temporarily at the airport because of his beard.  They must have thought he was a terrorist!  Why, here he and Georg come now:

That was a close one fellas!

In Yarmouth, the wind was much crazier than it had been in Portland.  I realized we were going into winter in Canada and i had no winter clothing.  I went into a Salvation Army, "they have these in Canada?" and found a hat, jacket and sweater for four bucks.  What a steal!

As soon as we set off, two women pulled up yelling for Georg to come over:

"You going to Halifax?"  he asked them.

"No, honey.  Where you from?"

"I am from Germany."  he said paced, with accent.

"I knew it.  I knew they were European," the girl screamed.  The other woman was her mother.

"You want to take trip to Halifax."

"No, honey.  That's three hours away."

"Come on.  We drive some, go to disco, party all night.  I will have you home by morning."

The girls were in the haze that comes between attraction and dissension when confronted by something exotic.  And even though they loved him, he couldn't talk them into the trip.  When he saw it was hopeless, he walked away.  Even after swinging his hips in insinuation of the disco.  They would not go for it.  He had a look of heated determination in his eyes from that point; surely, the partygoers must be around here somewhere!

We were picked up by this middle-aged man named Don.  We had split up, in order to better attract drivers.  Somehow Georg picked this guy up and managed to talk him into picking up Mark and me as well.  To nab three passengers at the same time, that is a feat!

The guy was strange, had a voice with the hard quick bravado like Hunter S. Thompson.  He seemed pretty radical, and a bit out of touch.  When he found out kids were still listening to vinyl, he was floored.  He was convinced we were lying and tried to weasel out the truth from us.  So the guy had never seen a turntable, i guess.  When we got into politics, he lost his mind.  He was way into 9/11 conspiracies and said "if George Bush was here right now i'd fucking shoot him in the face."  He had this weird intonation pattern that was blowing Mark's mind, where he'd end every phrase with "Yeah," and subsequently answer every question with "yeah" even if he was disagreeing.  Mark toyed with this by just saying "yeah" to the man; they rattled back "yeahs" four or five times in a single instance.  A very surreal moment.  The guy was pretty agitated, maybe that explains his peculiarities.  I'll never forget the guy making fun of the WWF, because his kids were fans:  "These two giant homos crawling all over each other, talking shit like 'I'm going to tear off your head and shit down your neck.  I'm going to pluck out your eye and piss in the socket.'"  Throughout his impression, his temporal veins were bulging and his face turned red.  The man was mad.  He dropped us off about 30 km from where he said he would, because he had to take his son to soccer practice or something.  I'm not sure why he suddenly lost trust in us, but it smelled of fish.  We were sort of stranded in the middle of nowhere at that point.  

So we began to walk.  We walked and walked, but it was an exciting 

moment.  The landscape was so rich with forest.  I remember remarking again and again, "I've never seen so many trees!"  The road was the only part of it that was man-made.  It was wilderness for ever on either side.  Then it started to rain.  We walked and walked until we came to a point where the road was an over pass above a valley.  We were going to camp out beneath this bridge, with one of us staying on the road to flag down a driver.  Mark decided to go first and almost as immediately as we went down there, a man pulled up.

The guy, an older man with a big, bushy white moustache and a nervous jitteriness that was both lovable and manic could only take two people.  Mark, being the hero that he is, said Georg and me should go.  "Are you sure?"  "Just go!" he yelled.  It was like one of those scenes in a war movie, when the shit gets too heavy and the one guy is injured already and he knows that if they take him they will surely all die, so he says to himself, I'm going to make a sacrifice for the crew, but don't let on that it's emotional because then they'll want to stay and we'll all be in the same situation.  Yeah, so that was the emotion then.  Mark has quite a story about what happened after we left too.  Best ask him though.  

The man we were driving with was one of the most informed persons i have ever spoken to.  In no way did i figure we would be getting a history lesson on Nova Scotia when we got picked up.  He told us about every place we drove through--even stopping at one point to get us coffee from Tim Horton's, Canada's signature coffee place--the working-man's coffee.  It seems pretty stupid to have a Dunkin Donuts like coffeeshop be your national staple, but everyone seems to enjoy it.  I mean, every time we went in to one, there were people having social outings or business meetings or truckers socializing.  In the ol' fashion tradition.

He took us through Kentville, the famous "land of pumpkins," where it's nothing short of pumpkin idolatry and there is pumpkin paraphernalia on every banner, mailbox, poster, and town stationery.  Through Waterloo, a town whose only industry is the procurement of Balsam fir trees, or Christmas trees, and 80% of them are exported to the United States.  The entire town is Christmas trees.  Told us about Stuttgart, a beach town, where the moon's beams create an ominous gravitational pull right off the coast, creating a lump, essentially, that rises the tide rapidly.  He described the process of people drowning on the beach, which happens often: backed by a rocky cliff-face they are a mile or two from where you can climb down.  The tide rises innocuously, centimeters at a time, and in the waves it doesn't really appear like it's dangerous until too late.  The water, like a stoic predator, rises and knocks people out, banging them on the rocks and then floats them out to sea.  

In Windsor, the birthplace of Hockey, there's a pumpkin regatta.  The pumpkins

 in Nova Scotia are so big that when you hollow them out, you can float on them in water.  They are like small rafts. An old man, eighty years old, wins the race every year and people do not understand why.  Apparently the trick is to have a light shell, for better buoyancy--or so our driver speculates.   

He also told me about the biggest non-nuclear explosion to have happened in the world.  In WWI, two munitions ships were harbored in the bay of Halifax, the Mount Blanc and the Imo.  I guess they collided and a fire started, there was no way for the sailors to put out the fire, so they tried as hard as they could to boat to shore.  Being that there was so much of a ruckus many people came to the shoreline or their windows as spectators.  The sailors in their boats kept shouting, "look away!  look away! hide your eyes!"  But people couldn't hear them.  I heard more people were blinded that day than any other moment in recorded history.  2,000 people died, including all the sailors.  The anchor was blown clear to the other side of the coast, 5 kilometers away.  Then a blizzard hit the city, hindering rescue efforts.  People were lying under crumpled homes and feet of snow.  

All the while he was telling us this story, rain was coming down in furious buckets.  The road was invisible and i felt like the wind was going to rock us off the road.  I could only imagine how Mark was doing.  I learned later of the sad moment where he gave up walking and sat on a bridge in the rain trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while all of his stuff got wet.  Meanwhile, my coffee was too black and my feet were slightly wet!  Sorry, Mark.  

Because of our destitute spot, Steve--or Doc, as he came to be called--said we could stay in his barn.  Georg and I were extremely grateful.  Georg had not really said anything in the back, i guess just taking things in.  He kept laughing when we got to the barn.  I imagine this is not how he visualized the trip.  

Doc was an inventor (hence the name--Doc, from BTTF), and his barn was filled with half-constructed oddities, pieces of furniture enhanced by machines or combinations of things like remote controls with wires that led to cat food feeders and the blinds folding.  Actually, i'm just speculating.  He didn't show us any of his machines that night, but his worktable looked busy.  Doc said he was embarrassed to let us into the barn, but we assured him we didn't care if it was messy.  He found a lamp we could use for some light.  The barn was still under construction and had not been structure protected yet, so the wind blew the polyethylene cover all night long--but it made for a spooky effect.  

I began talking to Georg who was ecstatic about the adventure.  It was a pretty interesting talk.  He told me about his hesitation to come to the US.  There's a lot of animosity between the Brits and the Germans.  He said he's sensitive about being called a Nazi.  "In the UK," he says he can't say he's German, "I want to say that I'm proud to be a German."  I had never really thought about that before.  I guess a lot of people have bad associations, left over from WWII, involving Germany.  Strange to think about what people might think about Americans--does the majority make the overall impression?  In that case, we might be in some trouble too.  But Georg's temperament was still very different, very European, i suppose.  His music was reggae and techno.  He liked clubs.  He liked soccer.  On American baseball, he said: "In Europe, at a soccer game, it seems people go to watch the game.  But in America, at a baseball game, it seems people are more just trying to talk to their friends and family.  It makes no sense!"  Oh you Europeans, being so practical about activities!  

In the morning we left Doc and headed to the highway.  We ended up having a lot more trouble getting rides that day.  i don't know why.  I believe we were walking for three hours before anyone picked us up.  I found a page from a hardcore pornography magazine, discarded presumably by an overeager trucker mishandling it as it flew out the window.  Then again, i have no idea how it came to be on the side of the road.  I figured i'd do something epic with it later.  We ate some breakfast on a sand heap on the side off the road.  I made up a song in a made-up language, that goes like this: 

sol-men-ay-la-ba

men-ay-la-sol

le-men-ay-com-pen-teau

I was probably singing that for forty five minutes.  Georg 

was down the road.  We split up to heighten our chances.  Often, i make up fake language songs.  This is the first time i wrote one down though.  At one point, i saw Georg's hat fly off his head when a semi-truck passed him.  It was hilarious.  We eventually did get picked up by a rattly old red pick-up truck.  The guy inside was younger, late-twenties and when he asked us where we were from and going, the first thing he said was "Ok, so i got a yank and a nazi," though it was lighthearted, Georg immediately took offense.  And to his credit, the guy was kinda crazy.

His name was Ben, he lived on some place called West Mountain--fourteen miles off of any paved road.  I saw a mountain in the distance and asked if that was his mountain.  "No, that's North Mountain," he said, "that's where all the gold-mining, incest-loving rednecks are from."  He proceeded to tell a joke about a girl from North Mountain wanting some money from her father, so he tells her to give him a blowjob.  "This tastes like shit," she says.  "Oh yeah," the father says, "your brother wanted to borrow the car."  I heard this joke once in grade school, so i knew the punchline was coming.  Georg, when we got out of the car, asked me if i thought the story was true.  I laughed, but never told him.  

Ben was a welder on high beams for high rises.  I told him i could never do that because i have a fear of heights.  "So do I!" he said, "It scares the shit out of me everyday, but that's why i love it."  He said that a few years back he went skydiving and realized that that is what he wanted to do with his life, so every day is a new death-defying challenge.  Pretty awesome.  We started talking about hunting for some reason and he said, "I got a 12-gauge in the back".  He kept talking about duck season, "can't wait to see the ducks!"  He said, "the sky blackens with 'V's."  He talked about the dangers of coyotes, how you don't want to get caught in the open, defenseless, with a pack surrounding you, "helps if you have a 12-gauge shotgun."  He pointed to the back.

In his speech i realized all the stereotypes of the Canadian accent were true, all the 'eh's and 'aboot's.  He told us to go to Spring Valley Road, or as he called it "Skin" Valley.  The girls are all there wearing short skirts, tank top hiked up with the tits poking out, I'm talking aboot sluts, eh?  

He dropped us off at the bus station and we hopped a ride that would lead us to Georg's cousin's place.  We had finally made it!

It was around noon that day.  Halifax is a pretty town; it's got a nice shore and a decent park we walked around in eventually.  His cousin is a med student who's busy-busy-busy, but finds time for family when they come around.  She was very curious to get my take on our upcoming election as "90% of Germans want Obama to win."  She took Georg and i to a farmer's market where i fell in love with two girls selling apples; they also gave me 2lbs. of carrots for 75 cents.  They invited us to a party we never went to, i don't know why not.  They were lovely.  

We were eating apples by the bay when Mark called and we decided to go meet him at Georg's cousin's place.  When Mark showed up, i don't know why, but her temperament changed.  She went from jolly and curious to reserved and dissociative.  Mark said she was "creeped out" by him, or he was by her.  But i don't understand why?  I guess Mark was perceived as terrorist at the border and it had lingering effects.  Who knows?  

Her roommate was this stoned-out kid who played shoot-em-up video games at high volume and watched action movies and ate wings all day.  I called him "88 minutes" after the "high octane" film he was watching when we first came in.  He talked like a drone and i don't know if he had a job.  he talked lots of shit on Halifax: "the bay is disgusting!  A hundred years of shit has been poured in there.  This town is a shit-hole!"  Mark said he reminded him of kids who went to Pitt but never explored the city, just stayed in Oakland and wondered why anyone would want to stay in such a shit city.  

We left them and went to go see the famous Park in Halifax, called Point Pleasant.  We took a long way getting there, walking this obscure path through a shipyard en route of the Boardwalk.  I broke down from my anti-sugar crusade and had a massive mint chocolate chip ice cream cone.  They mixed in heath chunks and nuts.  Yum!  Mark was taking pictures like crazy and sighed wistfully when he saw a sailboat.  The harbor was full of barges and a tiny island with a house on it.  Who lived there?  May no one ever know.  

The shipyard looked like most major port shipyards.  there were massive crane constructions erected like metal Brontausauruses plus huge walkways that were stilted into the sky, huge old factory warheouses and abandoned train cars that I guess were too old to use.

I took the piece of pornography that i had found hitchhiking and wrote a message on it in sharpee told from the point of view of a prisoner who is going to be put to death and it didn't make sense to take one life in exchange for another.  I then hid this cryptic note in

 between the bars of a park bench.  I hope a kid doesn't find it.  Probably, some joker will find it, see the pornography and immediately burn it.  Oh well, there's still a chance.  i love messages in bottles.  

Mark took a whole bunch of pictures and i got hungrier.  We found out that seagulls pluck clams form the water, ascend way high up then drop them on rocks so the shell explodes and they can eat the innards.  It looked like a battleground, debris strewn about all over the place, 

little shards of clamshell everywhere.  It was crazy.  Mark intoned for me his affection for dead trees at dusk, how the light filtering through gives the details an ominous magnificence.  He said, "I could take pictures of dead trees forever."  

We got lost trying to get out of the park, then took an incredibly long way back to the city.  A young homeless guy asked for change once and a cigarette the second time and then at another corner asked for pot.  I had this swirling inhibition to say 'no' to the guy.  I guess cause he was fiending.  He didn't seem to recognize us at any time.  We couldn't find a market that was open, so we ate at an italian restuarant.  Mark made the  point that it was completely necessary every once in a while to eat at a good restaurant  and that sentiment set an important tone for the trip.  We got back to Georg's cousins late that night.  They were in their room talking.  We hung out with 88 minutes for a little while, he was eating a meatball sub and not really talking.  We left in the morning, a big thank you to Georg's cousin for letting us stay, even though it got awkward.  I don't even know why.  

We had to rush to the train.  Mark and I both felt like we had missed something in Halifax.  

Mark ran into a girl he had met when we were seperated for a third time, just as we were leaving.  First on the bus, then the farmer's market, then now--by the train station.  Mark took it later as a sign that he should have fallen in love with her.  He even had a bracelet he wanted to give her that said simply, "I wish i could love and be loved in big cities."  

I also felt like i was missing something and realized what it was too late.  We had bought some groceries for the train trip and the hitchhiking to PEI.  As we were leaving the market, a traveler saw our packs and asked us where we were going.  The guy had a few piercings, was bulky and was wearing a black jacket with punk patches on it.  I felt reserved about giving the guy any money.  He never asked for that though.  He just wanted to talk.  He told us we wouldn't have much luck hitchhiking in New Brunswick, "you're going to be waiting there for days.  No one picks up there.  All rich people who inherited their money and think they earned it.  Good luck.  i bet if you do get picked up, it'll be someone coming from Nova Scotia, and someone from PEI will take you back.  There's a good blue-collar community there."  Mark said the guy sounded like he was full of shit, but he ended up being right.  "I've hitched across the country four times this year," he said.  "you guys ought to get up to Newfoundland.  There's no place more beautiful than that."  One of the big regrets of the trip is not heeding that advice.  I was sorry i had such poor reservations about the guy and that i my first inhibition was to be cheap as well.  As we left him, i realized what i had needed to do.  I never should have left that porn-message in the bench.  I should have given it to that guy.  That guy was the guy i wanted to find that message.  Hmm.  Next time.

Well, we left Halifax with soars on our intentions.  Maybe we'll be back, who knows?  Will we ever see Georg again?  Will we abandon the plans to head West and go up to Newfoundland?  Will Mark learn to love and be loved in big cities?  

Find out next time on A Cross-Continental MEss throo the odyssey of time, with your host, me. 

Portland, Maine and the Mighty Cat

The good ol' boys (and girls) of Portland Maine

We arrived in Portland talking to a girl named Elaina who was reading Proust and seemed like a honeybird.  As we pulled into the train station, the conductor got on, saying "Welcome to Portland, home of the B&M factory.  Technically, Boston does not have a bean factory anymore.  So i suggest Portland should be called--Bean Town." Here here, conductor man!  Elaina offered us a ride from her dad, who thought the situation was kind of awkward until he realized we were good ol' boys and meant no harm at all.  Phew!  

Portland, Maine!  What a town, a real old shipping community.  I bet there are little sailor towns like this all up the east coast.  It has its fair share of gentrification, yes.  I went into the "market," a fine wine and cheese shop, bought a $4 sliver (practically) of cheese, ate it with the sourdough and some wine--though it made a divine lunch, really. There's a big statue dedicated to those who fought in the Civil War right in the middle of the town

 square, where skateboarders in hoodies idle around with the pigeons.  You don't see many statues dedicated to civil war veterans.  It was a pretty impressive statue, too.  The square is really wide open, the type of square you'd want to play 4-square in, or a game of dodgeball.  All concrete, all bare.  But right in the middle this giant statue.  I liked the space of it.  I guess there's also this statue too, of a lobsterman.  Portland's known for it's lobster-fishing, i guess.  I found this when i did an image search for the other statue.  That's the thing:  Mark was the photographer on this trip, so i naively trusted him to take all the pictures.  Now, he's in Cuba smuggling goodtimes and all i have is a bunch of pictures that I knew he wouldn't take, like of transformers and my hand and all sorts of crap--none of the monumental stuff.  So anyway, that's why my pictures might be screwy; it's all his fault.  Anyway, this sums up the town of Portland. 

Oh yeah, except we stayed with these tubular people.  We had no place to go in Portland, so i went on couchsurfing.com and i found someone within hours.  This guy Greg lived in a house with ten other roommates.  The place was real raucous and all-together the cast of characters was this semi-anarchic Sesame street's retarded brother, people coming in and out, with entertaining baggage strewn left and right.  

Three of the guys were in a band, a blonde kid with a soft-spoken voice and dry humor who looked anywhere from 14-40, the way a face continues to ask question despite bags under the eyes.  He was pretty friendly, showed us around, made some spaghettios.  Counter-culture kids are amazing: poor, artistic and opinionated they can turn over depravity until it's romance; "I love ketchup sandwiches," I heard him say.  He had a fantastic dry wit and seemed to just wonder, a third party, a fly on the wall.  It makes sense he was the drummer.  The guitarist had huge eyes and huge gauges in his ears.  He was a vegan.  Mark has said to me before, "look out for the vegan in the house of meat-eaters.  Always a vicious type," but he seemed friendly, or did he? Later when we were playing the question game, "What would your spirit animal be?" He said he'd be a lion, and so i asked him, "Would you be a lion, or do you just want to be a lion?"  Then he looked at me with fierce prowling eyes, and i knew, i knew.  

There was a girl there named Rihannan for the Welsh goddess.  It has now been stuck in my mind that that is what a goddess would look like.  Because of Renaissance paintings, i've always put the image on a pedestal, what with the marble-mixed paint for sheen and the cherubim face, it always seemed so distant from "made in man's image."  Turns out

 goddesses are (as US magazine would say it:) Just like US!  She had short red hair and sharp blue eyes, and an intimidating walk--but she wasn't glowing.  I mean, if i touched her, i wouldn't explode.  Perhaps it's audacious to hold the stature of gods up to one girl with a god-like name, but i'm sorry, the damage has been done.  Rihannan from Portland Maine, you are how i know goddesses to look now.  Stay fresh!  (Fun Fact: For an excellent description of real-life witches, read Reinaldo Arenas' 'Before Night Falls') 

One of my favorite characters from the house was this man, Dylan Bredeau.  I use his full name because it was employed

 so much while we were there.  The name of the band is Dylan Bredeau (www.myspace.com/dylanbredeau), named in memorium after said Bredeau moved away, but then he moved back and enjoys the fame without having to play an instrument.  He was a charming young French-Canadian man who with his witty intellect rivaled the other alpha-conversationalist of the house: a spry, mad-witted young fiend named Dave.  Dave sat back, reclining in a discarded office chair making comments on the whole scene.  Somehow the conversation turned towards the impotent war between Maine and Canada called the Aroostok War, where farmers in Maine had to defend themselves from invading shoulders.  Bredeaux made it out to be an awful, mad war; but i found out later it was bloodless--only one casualty, and that was from heart failure.  The idea of it, he made seem, was repressed.  Which got us into conspiracy, where Dave got heatedly argumentative about the Kurt Cobain conspiracy, insisting on the facts, jack.  The last paragraph in the note was not his, the shotgun wasn't tested for prints, the door had to be locked from the inside.  I tried to make light of the conversation by insisting that without Cobain's death we would have never had Hole.  He did not find this funny.  All I can remember after that is a debate on the existence of Bigfoot which prompted Dylan Bredeaux to ponder the famous beasts hidden package: "Big feet...Big hands...Big mystery."

We went to sleep too late, after a multitude of Pabsts, woke up in the morning, saw that they had grown the biggest pumpkin i had ever seen (that is, until Nova Scotia!).  We ended up getting lost going to the ferry that would take us to Canada.  Some woman gave us directions that put us a mile out of the way--with our heavy packs and no time, that was far!  We ended up having to run there and getting on at the last possible moment.  We had to board the CAT ferry with the automobiles underneath in the cargo hold.  

When we emerged on the deck, i was amazed.  

A woman said to me, "I bet you've never seen so many old people?"  

She was right.  Even she was old.  

The ferry was crawling with seniors, which made me feel like we had somehow made a big mistake.  I have never been able to justify this emotion, but it still seems right.  I was tired.  We had got like four hours of sleep, so i tried to take a nap.  Mark like a happy dog rushed to the bak deck to watch the boat in action, talking up WWII veterans about the propulsion, the engine and other logistical nonsense.  I wanted sleep!  Unfortunately, the maritime winds were blowing their mess and the waves were tumultuous.  I couldn't sleep.  I sat in a chair rocking from one edge to another.  And you can imagine the people on the boat.  At first it was a tight little joke, people with sea legs--har har!  Then the vomiting started.  At first it was an insignificant problem.  People that normally get seasick.  Then people started tripping over themselves on the way to the restroom.  It was a total disaster.  One man was cradled in his hands for a solid three hours.  I would have felt bad for him, but he was so rigid he looked like a statue.  Anyone that still must be reserved, on hold, somewhere else.  Although being rocked on a solid piece of machinery like that did give me a scope of the mayhem that lies at the helm of the ocean.  A whole other world within our world of power and unforgiving.  I thought a few times this trip about becoming a sailor, but every time i get to sea i remember--the ocean is a fucking monster!  

The beast we were riding was called the CAT, a catamaran, designed with wave piercing hulls that cut through the waves rather than ride on top, unlike traditional ships.  It had four 9,500 horsepower diesel engines propelled by four water jets--each pumping the equivalent of an Olympic size pool full of water through each jet every three second.  I got a nifty fact sheet from the Cat desk on the way out!  

Here's what it looked and sounded like, just wicked!:

Bahstan

Tam and Dionna

Boston seemed alright.  The city was rainy but seemed small and comfortable.  Came across a woman with no teeth who asked us where we were from, told us a quick story about how she was jilted by a man from Pittsburgh ("You oughta be glad i don't kick you in your ass for that!") and how a deacon at the Catholic church had tricked her into thinking he wasn't married, or something, to jilt her.  I didn't understand what she was saying, but it sounded like a pretty ludicrous conspiracy.  Running to her bus, i asked her for her name, "my name is April but you can call me Irene," she smiled the glorious pink and black smile.  She was crazy, but she was lovely.  

We met up in Jamaica Plain with the girls we were staying with, who Mark didn't know but knew secondhand from some people in Pittsburgh.  They were moving out a friend, so they were a little preoccupied.  We wandered around town, stumbled on an Obama fundraiser where we ate a bunch of gourmet pizza and bowled candlepin bowling for a while.  It was sweet.  Yee-ha!  I got my picture taken with a giant cardboard cut-out of the president-elect.  I gave him bunny ears!  It was delightful.

We helped the girls move some, handling a dresser and bookcase they claimed was too heavy, but we found easy as hell to move.  It was an awkward spot for me, because the girls were gay and i did not want it to seem like i was showing off because I'm male.  Lesbians give that macho feel, and i didn't want to undermine them--as a guest--so i worry when these girls can't move a dresser that i can move with little trouble.  To avoid any potential problems, i made it seem like i was extremely winded and from that point on needed help with many other things being moved: boxes with books and a bunch of coats from a closet.  For all my cautious sensitivity, i think they were probably more annoyed that the guy who carried a dresser couldn't carry a duffel bag full of clothes.  Ah well, you win some, you akwardly lose some.  

I caught on t.v. some discovery channel thing about a guy who free-climbed up cliff faces.  No harness, no gloves, no rope.  "If there's no risk of falling, it's not real climbing," he said.  I was floored.  Later on when me and Mark were talking about it at the bar, he mentioned that the guy only had one arm, a detail i failed to see.  Somehow i was less impressed.  He became to me more of a mythic creature then, something that exists but is impossible.  I stopped thinking about him as an impressive man and he just became one of those half-men, half-gods, like Hercules.  And Hercules' shit is sooooo passe.  

Anyway, we went to an expensive bar which in the gentrifying space of Jamaica Plain had been converted from a queer-friendly, karaoke specials biker bar to a yuppie, dungeon-themed sports bar called the Alchemist.  It's a plot line straight out of a Tom Robbins book, yes folks.  Drinks were too expensive and apparently the servers were dumb as mutton (one of the girls told this story: when the food came out wrong and the server asked, "well, what do you want instead?" And she answered, "I'll have what she's having."  Thirty minutes pass then, "Hey, where's my food?"  "I thought you were going to eat off her plate!")  We got semi-drunk and started talking about this show on Spike TV called Manswers, which combined sports, chicks and explosions into a menagerie for the Id by answering "sent-in" questions like "Which tits float better?  Natural or silicone?"  I thought their interest was strange because they were gay and the show was obviously tuned towards a hedonism that would probably qualify as slightly antifeminist.  But then, they may have liked it with surreal irony, like that "Springtime for Hitler" song from the Producers.  A situation becomes so exaggerated there is no alternative but to laugh. Anyway, they put me on the spot again, when they asked: what question would you ask?  Man, there's a thousand deviant perverse questions i could ask, flying through my mind like a dismantled helicopter propeller made from the mobile above the Marquis de Sade's bed; but i came up with "How fast can racecars go in reverse?"  Damn.  I was really proud of that one.  Especially because that is a really good question for Manswers.  it's a palindrome, right?  It should be able to go just as fast backward as forward!  They could go ask Danica Patrick, in a bikini or something.  it would be a hit!  

The girls we were staying with were named Dionna and Tam.  Tam had been a skateboarder and had traveled the continent in the search for the perfect skate park.  She found that empty pools were her slice of pie.  Her father, brother, uncle and grandfather all worked for Amtrak so she took trains for free.  She would go to a place, find a park then ask to crash at anyone's house.  One time, she said, she asked a guy and he said you can stay my place "but if you touch anything i'll fucking kill you."  Alright, she said--blowing it off as weirdness.  Only later, she was confronted by someone else who said to her, "don't stay with that guy.  He's psychotic and a murderer.  You can stay with me."  Off in the distance the other guy was twitching and punching an invisible bag near the wall.  Phew, close call.  But then the second guy turned out to be a shady drug dealer with issues of his own.  I won't tell you what city it was in order to protect it's reputation.  oh alright, it was Baltimore.  

We left the bar around 1am and Tam asked if any of us wanted to go get "a fucked pile of fried."  She meant the chinese food down the street.  I thought that description was delightful.  We left early in the morning and grabbed a loaf of sourdough bread at a neighborhood market then arrived at the train station to Portland, ME with 30 minutes to kill.  

New Yahk, New Yarhk, It's a hell of a town!

Our story begins on the shorelines of the north side of Pittsburgh, at a certain Brian and Rachel's house.  We were set to take off on the train early on the morning of September 29.  i walked into the house, it smelled like freshly cooked basil.  They had cats all over the place, apparently after having saved a pregnant cat dying by the Ohio River.  Brian traded me backpacks so i would have a good hiking backpack.  He had found it in a dumpster and the only thing wrong with it was a broken shoulder strap, which he sewed back together with fifty thousand layers of dental floss.  It has not failed yet.  

It was 5:30 in the morning, we left Brian's house and headed to the train station.  Halfway down the block, i realized i forgot my sleeping bag.  "Oh no," i thought, "if it's going to be like this the whole time i'm screwed."  Luckily, i was not as bad at forgetting things as Mark, who lost some money, a big bag of food, lenses to his camera, free food Rachel got from Dozen, a container of hummus, a 10-pass metrocard in New York, 20 photographs from Toronto, his mind, and his "List of things forgotten" list--so there's probably much more.  I forget what i forgot, except for the sleeping bag--which i remembered.  

Anyway, as soon as we got on the train, we met Deewight who you might remember from Mark's blog.  He was a pretty strange guy.  When we boarded the train he was sleeping sprawled on the seats and scratching his belly.  Then he spent a lot of time looking out the window.  Something sparked a conversation and he seemed to know a lot about the country.  Hell, he'd been everywhere--Vegas, Atlanta, Jersey.  He graduated from Boston University and had worked craps at casinos for many years.  He talked at ease, responding to everything with a stretch of his arms and saying "that's sharp."  Talk about nightclubs in NYC, ooh, that's sharp.  Or fishing in Delaware.  Ooh, that's sharp.  Or eating hot pretzels.  Ooh, that's sharp.  I liked this guy, his smoothness and his wily hair.  He looked pretty aloof, as he was traveling with trash bags and his hair was as frizzy as a hairdryer dropped in the bathtub; and he called Central Park, "Grand Central Park," but hell--it's still sharp.  When we told him about our trip he said simply, "Sometime you gotta step out into the world..." nodding approvingly.  A blessing for the whole journey.  Thank you, sir.

We arrived in New York, making our way to Williamsburg in Brooklyn.  We met up with Mark's friend PJ, an animal rights activist whom Mark prompted me to be careful with.  He has a particularly vicious temperament and doesn't bode well with people.  I took the advice and watched what i said around him.  Man, he was vicious, and a little crazy, but all in a very monumental way.  

PJ worked as an activist since he was was a kid.  He had made a name for himself.  When he came to New York he had found a woman who dug what he was doing and also owned an apartment building.  She essentially provides him free rent and a huge space in the basement to work from.  He has a shelter area built in there, with about 50 stray cats.  They are trapped, spayed and neutered--then trained for domestication.  If they are unable to be trained because they are too feral, he has at least neutered them and sets them back out into New York's obscenely massive stray cat population.  He dealt with all kinds of cats, diabetic or with leukemia, burned by chemicals, left to starve, one-eyed diseased cats on the verge of death, cats so twisted and violent from neglect they could not be approached without becoming viciously defensive.  

The idea is to put some control on the exploding cat population within the city.  He was licensed 10 years for animal care, given generous donations by animal-loving philanthropists but he still talked shit, a dirty wicked sailor with the highest standard and most vitrolic poison slung on anyone who doesn't give it their all--cunt, cunt, cunt!--to anyone whose dedication is not completely given to the endeavor.  He despises hypocrites and anyone who challenges him, barking in the face of anyone who provides, essentially, "injustice," or disrespect.  

I have to give it to him.  The man was completely dedicated, spending all this time rescuing animals.  His problem is that he expects so much from his helpers and hates them for not doing enough.  With every treated animal, he becomes that much more disgusted by humanity.  He laid it on everyone, decrying an established rabbi in the community for supposedly scattering lye on some stray feral cats, or the woman working at a big shelter for not putting her foot down when they euthanize cat because they have leukemia, diabetes or are otherwise sick.  He railed on people in Pittsburgh for being too impotent for their causes and people in New York for being too selfish with their time.

We passed by an ironic art display, a bunch of empty cracker boxes stacked up like apartment buildings with a sign that made a statement about the foreclosures recently.  There was a pigeon idling on the display

"Whoooooah," PJ realized, when he saw the bird.  

He got near it, picked it up.  All the while some dumb lady behind him was rambling like "Is that your friend?" "Wow, that's brave (picking up the pigeon)."  "He's a piece of the art, isn't he?"  PJ, not hearing her, told us later that if had heard her, he would have railed her with "oh sure, you dumb cunt.  Query with the masses.  Why don't you go slum it in Williamsburg some more while you live in a penthouse in SoHo, with that old ugly man who is cheating on you.  Or better go back uptown and cry your lonely life to your next mid-life medication you stupid, slimy whore."  Luckily, he didn't hear her--somehow.  I mean, she was rambling in his ear.  Instead, he picked up the pigeon and an old hippy guy with a russian accent came near him saying, "Hey, that's part of the installation."  He must have been the artist. 

"I'm an animal practicioner.  Why is he on display?"  

"He's the guardian of the city--He'll fly away when he's done here."  

"Well, i think i'm going to take him."

"I don't want him to be played with." 

"Oh," PJ smiled, "I'm going to play with him.  I'm going to play with him in very, very special ways."  

PJ was pissed off and he could sense something was wrong.  He told one of his helpers later to go tell the guy she saw a man biting the heads off pigeons.  Apparently, we were lucky he didn't flip out on the guy, blaming the hippies for prolonging the Vietnam war with inefficacy or something and shouting at the guy to humiliation in the middle of a busy street.  Sure enough, when we got back to the building, he found the pigeon had a bolt lodged in its crop(neck).  

He has a hard way of dealing with things not exercised to their full potential, someone crosses him the wrong way they become the "cuntiest cunts of cunt city."  The helpers he has, who work under him, prove their loyalty by putting up with him, by listening to him and taking his verbal abuse and not giving up.  He is earnest, dedicated and ambitious.  Albeit, maybe crazy.  But that's what it takes, a needle through the eye--he's up nights!  He is hardworking and profoundly successful.  The warehouse-looking room in the basement of the building was filled with cages and trappers.  Some of them housing at most 5 cats.  Cats abused and forgotten.  Some, too feral to be given a home, were spayed and neutered to be released again.  

The idea was--and this is sort of the genius--instead of euthanizing cats too miserable and erratic to live in a home, to release them back onto the streets neutered.  They would still provide competition to cats vying to have more kittens--the population could stabilize this way.  By having a termination block of spayed cats, down the line the population would control itself.  A technique that, essentially, positively uses natural selection.  

PJ collected mice who had been tested on, lab rats as well.  Dogs, he picked up, neutered, spayed, trained them, took them to a better home.  Lobsters in a big tank at a supermarket.  Broke in and took them out, found a way to ship them to Maine to be let back in the ocean.  Heart and soul.  

He had two pit-bulls which he had found stray.  These were the guys he held on to.  I slept with them that night at the apartment.  I don't know if you knew this, but the teeth on a pit bull can bite through a tin can.  At one point, i had my hand in the dog's mouth and he started chewing it off.  It's hard to be mad though when THEY'RE SO DURN CUTE!@!!  Also, they gave me bed bugs--which was a mega pain in the ass!  He also had built a closet like space, about 4'x6' in his apartment which he kept as a nest for injured pigeons, "one a day," he said; the sounds of their idle flapping lapped the night like a ticking clock.  

We ended up meeting with Danny for only a minute at a small French cafe called Mon Petit.  It was a strange spectacle, us walking in with heavy packs on and smelling dirty.  He was simultaneously drinking a cup of coffee with a glass of rose.  Mark commented later that Dan had changed, far from the hip-hop guru and street king he once was, he now had the hispanic look going; slicked-back hair, popped collar.  Mark also commented that he had never seen such a substance addict.  In the thirty minutes we spent with him, he drank two glasses of wine, a cup of coffee, smoked three cigarettes walking four blocks and the whole time talked about getting some smoke.  He takes it all in smorgasboard.  A revelry with jet fuel.  Oh, these New York monsters!

Doting on the appropriateness of the time, Mark drank his first cup of coffee ever---EVER!  A really delicious french roast that i'm sure made his heart tingle.  

Dan talked to us about the absurdities of the Jackson Heights dance scene.  No girls to dance with at the clubs in Queens, have to pay $2 to get a girl to dance with you.  'Dos dolares, senor.'  '?Que?'  '!!!Mi obra, aqui, obra aqui!!!'  He was getting fed up with the Albanians he worked for at Lumine, calling their language schizophrenic jargon, single-phrase quick sputterings (yelled PO-PO-PO or KOSZ-O-NOM!) so fast you would have to be convinced it was crazy talk if the phrases were Americanized.  He told us of his now slightly embittered exhaustion with the dumb, poor and hopeless ("fuck 'em" he said, compelling his flight further to an understanding in social darwinism "Republicans for Obama, Wat-up!") and then shared some memories of Pittsburgh, like making collect calls from the porn theater The Garden as Osama Bin Laden.

He's now fully into his real-estate gig, having become a broker at a brokerage.  He works his ass off, telling me about the busiest day of his life.  Woke up, made love to his girl since it was his day off.  it was 11am and he gets a text message, "Call here, asap."  Picks up the phone, "the couple just called, they want to close the deal.  Get a check by them by today or we'll lose the it."  Bolts out the door, calling them on redial--no answer.  Heads to the bank, taking out new bonds for his IRA when they call.  "Where are you?"  "Midtown." She works at the United Nations building.  He runs to the train, knocking people over on the platform, runs off it, sprinting through the cold.  Meets her in the lobby of the UN then sprints back to the agency.  "Congratulations, your first sale."  A rush of calm, and then...shit, school starts today!  He runs to the campus, having missed his first class, barges into the second.  Apologizes--no problem.  Heads to work.  While serving rich lawyers and pouring their wives champagne he is in between phone calls to the brokerage making sure the check passes, an upset with them cataloguing his tuition.  Not to mention that when he tried to find the street for the apartment, an Autobahn Avenue, uptown; he didn't know where it was.  So quietly he asked in the elevator a woman, "Do you know where Autobahn is?"  "Autobahn!" she asked loudly, "I don't know Autobahn!  Hey, anyone know where Autobahn at?"  The whole elevator russled, then out of the thick crowd a watery-blue eyed crackhead came up to his face, saying "Autobahn!  You looking for Autobahn.  It's to de east!  tha east!!"  He kept shouting, it was to the east, and even escorted him off the platform to the stairs to point the direction.  This was his day off, for the most part, except for the school he forgot about and the 8 hours he needed to work.  This is the New York lifestyle i suppose, jackrabbits on their way to the bank and the market.  An insanity i can not begin to fathom.  The beginnings of our trip, total madness.  Will there be a New York in Canada???  Only time will tell.  And it's questionable whether we'll meet characters like Dan or PJ there either.  But who knows? 

Dan and I discussed literary theory at the top of the stairs to the train station.  Particularly, time

 in 'Point of View', where the narrators perspective either slows down

 to an instant or rapidly speeds up in a timeframe.  He was reading this very extensive book in spanish and explained how the notions are better understood because he must take the time and patience to translate them.  We had only minutes to catch our train so we ran to the station and barrel-rolled in at the last moment.  Phew, NewYork!

Hey there folks!  So this is the beginning of my fantastic spectacle of a time in Canada.  

Now, i am getting used to the computer here so give me time to work through it.  For instance, i could not figure out how to edit a picture with the likes of a Microsoft Paint type application on my ma's Mac, so i printed out the picture and cut it up myself, as you might see on your left.  

Now, i know that in the information age, this kind of lame editing is reserved for the Special-Geniuses in the back of the Apple store, but i kind of like it.  It has that old world, retarded pastiche--like a peasant would have made a JPG.  

So, i'm going to be getting on about my journeys.  Oh sure, i'll exaggerate.  I'll exaggerate the living hell out of it.  I mean, nothing much happened.  But you'll leave this webpage feeling like a golden hand just grazed the back of your neck--yes, that's right--you'll clench up and your senses will all be devastated.  Of course, in the best way possible.