Drowning Nor Waving

I want so much to not be cynical.  I want to look up into the sky every morning and feel my heart lace through the sunshine; to cup my hands around transcendences like a Douglas Coupland girl.  I want to hopscotch over the bad things on a string of generosities, and thus find my way to shore.

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You know I'm working on Indestructible by the sound of unmitigated sobbing coming from behind the laptop.

Lots of kind of half-assed planning today, and not a lot of follow-through.

Met up with subject_zero as advertised, and decided we'd try for the Museum of Anthropology: one of the backpackers I was drinking with last night said it was really very good, and I hadn't been out by UBC just yet. So we walked to the stop for the right bus, only to have the bus pass us right by, and Danny said, "Hey, is it even open today?" So I made sure. And no, it was not. Dammit, Vancouver: I like culture on Mondays too.

Cast about for a few more ideas, and ended up at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which we knew was nearby because Occupy Vancouver is right in front of it. The first two floors are closed -- they're putting in a new exhibition -- but the third and fourth were open, and they weren't bad exhibitions: on the third, a history of the collection itself, complete with copies from their files about restoration, and the founding of the museum, and various pieces they'd acquired on subscription. The one about Emily Carr and their restoration drive for her stuff was especially good, as were the 1910s newspaper clippings, mostly due to awesome 1910 typography. On the fourth was a three-artist video installation exhibit: one from Vancouver, one from LA, one from Guadalajara. The last two were really quite good, and video's not exactly my thing.

Best thing in the gallery today: probably a full-room installation of a cityscape made of coloured plastic, with projectors running images of cityscapes through them and onto the white walls. It was something about the way the light broke and twisted through them, and the feeling of being inside and outside the piece all at once: it reminded me of the best thing we saw at Nuit Blanche this year, in the Gladstone, with the screens full of shots of crows. We do not necessarily know art very well here, but we know what we like.

Ironically, though, it was pretty hard to get a washroom in the gallery. There was one right in front, and the security guard manifestly would not let me use it even though I was right there about to get an admission. Third floor or nothing. This is deeply ironical in a city where there are actually clean, free, accessible public washrooms in parks in the poor part of town. Income disparity strikes again.

After being cultured and so on, ran a few errands: picked up some US cash for Seattle tomorrow, grabbed a coffee on Georgia Street (thus completing our survey of the major Vancouver coffee chains visible: Blenz, Waves, and Trees), and walked through one of the downtown malls, where I failed to get a refill of face powder and Danny ogled iPads, and we concluded that malls are fundamentally the same the world over and mostly suck pretty hard. And then we meandered back to Granville for dinner at a big and trendy-looking sushi place that was nonetheless pretty much empty, and ate all the sushi in the world. The value of all-you-can-eat is apparently lots. We've been walking all day for three days. I think we needed the protein.

Our conviction that Vancouver is frozen in musical 1998 continues. Music played at the sushi place included Sloan's "The Good in Everyone" and the Refreshments' "Banditos".

Back at the hostel now, camped out in my first-floor armchair (informally dubbed the Quiet Room, it being quieter than the common room) to answer e-mail, figure out the distances and ways and means between me and the bus station, the Seattle bus station and jonofthewired's place, all that and the airport for Thursday, and just generally be central in case anyone from the little posse we had going last night is heading down to the bar. Although given how sleepy I am at this point, I may just call it an early night. There is a reasonable amount of travel happening tomorrow.

Next update from Seattle!

Only a day and a half into the trip, I think we can categorically say this was a good idea. I have been really worked up for the past couple months. I am not exactly worked up at the moment.

So!

subject_zero picked me up at the airport last night after my first large-plane flight in quite a while (you don't even feel those landing. It's kind of amazing) and we parked my stuff at the hostel where I'm staying, smack in the middle of Vancouver's club district. Very late dinner (lobster ravioli, beer, cheescake, more beer) and filthy gossip ensued at a microbrewery by Waterfront Skytrain station. I have missed subject_zero terribly.

This was pretty much the night: it was late, I'd done a five-hour flight, and generally lying down seemed like a good idea.

The hostel's nice and tidy and cheerful and packed with Australians. My roommates for the moment are three pretty nice undergrads from Portland, up for their fall break, who were out clubbing until an amazing hour last night -- I didn't hear them come in, and I was up until about 3:30 Pacific (mostly wondering why I wasn't tired when it was past 6am on Brain Local Time, and how was I still awake?). This means I'm getting a certain amount of privacy: I'm out most of the day, and when I come back, it's the room to myself and playing my music and general chilling out for hours. There's free wifi and a common room, and the kitchen is huge. So far, it hostelling is beating the hell out of hotels.

Vancouver itself: cool and damp and ivy-covered, and full of crows, which apparently fill the niche that pigeons do at home. I can't get my finger on the architecture: it's this mix of curvy ultra-modern stuff and almost coastal US warm-climate houses, and the kind of pastel siding I've seen in the Midwest. There are a lot of condos, and there is a lot of green. It feels kind of young and slick. I don't get that sense of age, of layered history, I have back home. Also, decided lack of hipsters thus far. We may be in the wrong neighbourhoods for it. Surprising amount of on-street cosplay, though.

There is a thing the sky does here, heavy with three different-coloured striations of cloud, where it lies low and thick over the ocean and flows down into the mountains, and you feel...contained. Most effectively and completely contained, as if someone's put a lid over the top of the world. It's not oppressive -- everything is sort of too big and stately green to feel oppressive, really -- but that cloudy sky is like a hand light on your shoulder. You can never quite forget it's there.

It's a curious and beautiful city. I'm pretty rock-certain already I could never live here. There are red maples planted here and there, and I kept lingering among their leaves, just hungry for the shocks of colour amidst all the soft grey.

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This morning, rolled out of bed to what looked like it was going to be rain (the rain never actually materialized) and met up with subject_zero around noon to go to the Granville Island Public Market. First rule of Vancouver: Everything is always farther than you think. No, really. Farther.

This will become important to the story later.

So we walked across the Granville Street bridge and around and down and in this weird loop to get to the island, which is sort of like what would happen if someone took a tourist town or that one area of Charlottetown, PEI and smacked it in the middle of some other city: lots of little shops, crafts, nice wide sidewalks, etc. Considering how much we had to backtrack to get there, I suspect the artists have been corralled onto the island in the middle of the river to keep them contained (like Escape from New York, just without the President). It's small and lovely, and the farmer's market there is a bit like St. Lawrence: spread through a few buildings, and reasonably broad. I should probably not be so surprised at how comfortable I am in a market, but it's like finding my safe place. We'll probably be going back Monday or Tuesday to stock up for the trip to Seattle.

But for today, we picked up a whole bunch of food -- walnut and rosemary bread, cheese curds, honey garlic pepperoni sticks, Indian candy, passion fruit, tiny little bananas, pomegranates, Fuji apples -- to be our provisions for Stanley Park.

Stanley Park is...not a park as I am familiar with them. It is an old growth rainforest, lurking at the edge of a city. It smells soft and sharp like fallen leaves and the ocean, and it's damp everywhere, even though it didn't rain; I'm convinced it was just damp out of sheer habit. There's a seawall running along the outside, with historical plaques and such facing the bay, and steps down to the water in case you for some reason want to walk down into the ocean. And then there are trails and trails everywhere though the woods. We ate passion fruit and bread on park benches by a stand of totem poles, and watched the mountains, and found which redwoods are in fact Ents.

Thing is, it's is also farther than you think it is, and bigger.

We were overall shooting for Prospect Point, at the far north end of the park: kind of rambling about, looking at things, taking our time. What we took is probably the most roundabout, longest, least efficient route to Prospect Point that mankind has ever invented. It was extremely scenic and a great walk. But then it was 5pm, and we were only halfway there. And our feet really hurt. There was...some interesting and creative swearing. And a few kind of tired giggles.

But since this is adventure day? We went anyways.

It was maybe kind of stupid: if we'd turned around, we could have grabbed a lazy dinner and whatnot, and probably felt better for it in the morning. But it was also kind of worth it: The view out to the ocean is kind of ridiculously incredible, and catching it with the sun going down was probably even better. There was also a cafe up there, and we sat down (yay!) and ate some things with protein in them (yay!), having already demolished most of our snacks. And then we, well. Had to get back out of the park, all the way back where we'd come from.

Yeah. *g*

Walking down through Stanley Park at night is a bit like Escape from Witch Mountain, or a whole subgenre of horror movies and/or Criminal Minds episodes. Whole legions of my relatives are never going to find out that happened so I don't get strangled, revived, and strangled again. But? High adventure, people. High effing adventure. Also, the road straight through the middle is really a lot faster than whatever it was we did on the way up.

We ended up sitting for an hour or two in a coffeeshop near Burrard Station trying to make our feet do things again, puttering and chatting and eating Nanaimo bars. The other thing Vancouver seems to do so far is be musically no later than 1998 at all times: both today's coffeeshops, the one I grabbed breakfast at this morning and the one we found this evening, and the hostel both this morning and tonight in the common room were playing stuff I haven't heard since I was 16. Also, the Burrard coffeeshop rickrolled us. And we don't think it was ironic.

So after all that, we split up for the day and I stumbled back to the hostel (with a side trip through Occupy Vancouver on the way) and tucked what leftover groceries I had in the kitchen with an eye to climbing into bed early. Instead, ended up in a two-hour conversation with a severely cute guy from Dublin who handed me a spoon and shared his pint of Ben and Jerry's with me in the hostel kitchen (another point in favour of hostelling: cute Dubliners! Ice cream!). And now I am on my bunk, frittering about the Internet with extremely sore feet and a general and fuzzy sort of contentment. I'm hoping to be up for the two-dollar breakfast downstairs tomorrow morning, so sleep is soon.

...and yeah, that was only the first full day of nine.

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Tomorrow's only half-planned: definitely Chinatown, and definitely my little walkthrough of Main and Hastings, so as to write Indestructible properly, with tastes and detail and smells. No idea what else we might get up to. It probably depends on the state of our feet, and the weather, and the operant whimsy.

Thrilling updates tomorrow. Goodnight, children everywhere.

The weather's broken here in the T-dot; it's been cooler and sunshiny with bouts of Crazy! Rain! for added flavour for the past few days (which, might I add, is really lovely when we have all the windows open at home: it sounds like you're in the last treehouse outpost of civilization during a very Bradburyesque green end of the world). My two-week-long bout of insomnia hasn't broken just yet, but the cool weather's helping: I've managed to sleep some the past few days. Not enough (wah!), but enough to work:


The window table at Aroma is mine. I will unhesitatingly cut all trespassers.

The edit has progressed into chapter four, which is a land of mostly fairly focused and isolated notes, one of the major systemic issues, and then one tricky interconnected thing that sent me back and forward in the manuscript to construct and seed a consistent rationale for a whole line of conflict that's better than because I said so. I think it works now. I'll check for soundness on the next pass.

I've also hit the point where there are a few things I need to ask my editor about: wordcount inflation and clarifications on some notes and the like. I shall bundle them up in a package with an attractive bow and e-mail them over tonight.

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Otherwise, things we have been doing?

Went to a workshop in Kensington last night that was half identifying culinary and medicinal herbs that grow randomly in the downtown core and half making salve out of them; the workshop leader was, coincidentally enough, someone I went to elementary school with (see: the Only 500 Player Characters in Toronto theorem). They're doing another one on canning and pickling next month, and that's on the calendar. Afterwards, watched Proof with Dr. My Roommate, which was a startlingly chewable and amazingly well-written movie, and managed to finally deliver a late birthday present to a friend, who seemed to (yay!) really like it.

The autumn concert ticket pile has been started. Just two shows so far, but consider this to be a nice solid foundation for the fifty-floor skyscraper I'm planning.

Planning for the Most Epic Housewarming in the Universe has also started. A couple days of my time are going to be spent test-cooking party snacks very soon.

Did a stack of additional notes on Indestructible while I was feeling it the other afternoon, and have roughed the structure of the first few scenes. There is a thing in the file which could be the first line. It could not. First lines delineate and circumscribe so very much about a book. They have to be chosen with ultimate care.

Put in some work towards getting the September issue of Ideomancer ready, which will be coming to that website over there near you on, well, September 1st. I'm really pleased with the TOC on this one: it's thematically solid, but really nicely varied in terms of style and genre. We just bought a raft of really good poetry, too.

There is a cabbage as big as my head in my fridge, from last week's farmshare. Dinner tonight will be cabbage rolls. Apple coleslaw or Waldorf salad may also be in my future. It depends if I can get some decent apples on the way home.

Speaking of which, my battery has maybe 10 minutes left on it (and the downside of working at Aroma is that the plugs do not, how we say, plug), so home is where I'm going. More tonight, maybe, if my concentration keeps.

I have come to understand why authors write proposals. You write the proposal for the editor, sure, but you also write it to get the idea out of your head; so it'll stop haunting your footsteps, whispering in your ear; so you can stop catching yourself humming its songs in the laundry room and get back to the thing you're supposed to be writing.

That being said.

September 27, 2009 Progress Notes:

Indestructible

Words today: 100.
Words total: 100.
Reason for stopping: This is snippet and outline and notes and arguments. I'm not ready to actually start writing yet, thus the token wordcount. That's what I've got in snippets and paragraph-ends. The notes are considerably longer.

Darling du Jour: No darling.

Mean Things: The Highway of Tears. The BC Missing Women Investigation. And having to find out the bad news thirdhand.

Books in progress: Daniel Rabuzzi, The Choir Boats.
The glamour: ...actually? This is the glamour right here.

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It has character names and thematics, and some soundtrack and an argument, and the outline of the first chapter although the third scene thereof is under debate.

I made it an icon.

I guess it's a book.