Choose a direction?

Take the stairs?

Underground rules.

Happy and white in the heart of the empire …

leave the light on.

Where have you been?

In the morning, the sun is with us.

Spring and early light have settled in. It’s been awhile, but I’ve been noticing the traffic by my place … I was itchy to tell ye something, say a thing or two, but I lost the camera. These are test shots with the new snapper (Finepix Z 100). Without an arty-photoshop-tweak I’ve got little to show for the effort. Adjust curves, if ya know what I mean.
ahem.

In the morning I am often early, busy; marking papers, putting on clean clothes that (intend) to stay clean (whiteboard markers notwithstanding), making tea in a thermos, listening to cbc radio1, maneuvering my bicycle off the narrow concrete ledge and down in the elevator, 19 floors to the street … going to school.

This is my shared-cublicle. I have -in a (non-unionized/sessional-meat) manner of speaking- joined the cubiclean horde, and yet; i can only report a near *gonefulness *(shakespeare coined by the dozen and so may all of us) of all dead air and the total surrounding of the heart with blooming. I rather like the austerity of my bench – relief consists of a postcard repro. from a ginormous travelling show of Cuban art (still) at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, a cartoon that really tickles my heel, a multiverse of many-coloured, felt-tipped pens and tea. Mint.

My deskmate provides the tissues which I think is pretty nice. Just being there – as groups of people from everywhere on earth study a language together and speak it in common -is- amazing.

I’m in love.

Pictures of lolcatz – even sans caption – are cheap ‘n’ easy sure shots. Hence, two (only somewhat) enhanced snaps of Myshkin. Myshkin is Russian for mouse, apparently. Funny what irony you may miss when you read The Idiot in translation.

I don’t think this camera is going to work out, although it had some pretty sw-eeet features, chief among them being the smile filter.

Biometrics, baby – weeeee-iiii-rd science.

We’ve all met people who seem unable to respond to one smiling face at a time, nevermind a camera that fits in the palm of my hand, reads as many as ten faces at once and detects when they are smiling and only then – snap!

If I owe you a long letter – and you KNOW who you are – please, forgive me. I’m one step away from “send”.

I love you.

I hope that green that only spring brings you ~didn’t/doesn’t~ pass you by.

Don’t be shy … we can talk here:

The weather was blue when we left Toronto, east on the 401.

In Canada we take long distances in stride, raised on the notion of vastness. The wilderness is still out there. In spite of all our scraping and cutting – it’s still bigger than we are – and we know it.

I remember a mercator projection of Canada in grade two, six years old. My anchor was that map, five feet wide, hanging in a roll above the chalkboard. I remember my teacher, spring, 1974, pulling the plastic ring at the end of a cord, unfurling the map, four feet deep. I remember the short, sharp tug needed to stop/start the map rolling itself back up.

We sang O’Canada every morning. Our teacher said;
“This is a map of Canada. There are ten provinces and two territories.”
She told us Canada was the second largest country in the world.

She wanted to get across to us the scope of it all.
I had already tasted the distances involved. We moved regularly.
West coast. Prairie. Upper Canada. East coast…

We hit the snow somewhere near Kingston and came out the other side, 400 kilometres East.

We tripped East again to Ville Marie.

Nous avons marché vers le haut sur la montagne
et nous sommes rappelés Jésus de Montréal.

What strangers in a strange land we all are.

United in our identity crisis’, landed here by our ancestors,
brought by histories and circumstances, we are all one and the same.

Je me souviens aussi.
Que vous rappelez-vous ?