A FAN’S NOTES

A Big Day Out, a Big Game

The area around the box office at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium was deserted. A kissing booth at a covid fair. I’d missed the opening kickoff by half an hour. I requested a single ticket, the cheapest aisle seat available. A baker’s dozen years had passed since I’d last attended a Canadian Football League game.

Football was my favourite sport when I was young; the one I was best at. I was good enough to be co-captain and third-string quarterback on my high school’s worst-ever bantam team. Players in grades above and below me were so much better. The perks of a double-sized locker and early dismissal on game days mattered as much as the prize of an embroidered school letter for extramural sports. I believe I sustained just one concussion. Having your brain folded like an omelette back then was just having your bell rung. Once the field see-sawed back to level you got up and a whistle blew, play resumed.

As a kid I collected CFL player cards. I knew all the poses. I had a Coleco CFL electric football game. I painted the plastic players to make them appear more authentic: black or white cleats, white socks and various skin tones. I saved up to buy a set of plastic team helmets, smaller than a golf ball, at the local stationery, a one-man operation with half an aisle devoted to toys. I arranged them by division atop the cardboard grandstand. I rearranged them on Mondays after reviewing league standings in the morning newspaper’s sports section. All very professional.

In Montreal we had the Alouettes and later the Concordes. The francophone media dismissed football as an “English” sport, perhaps because of its rugby roots. Failed franchises. Baltimore’s Stallions, ridden hard and put away wet, the lone surviving club of the CFL’s audacious and disastrous US expansion scheme, relocated to Montreal and revived the Skylarks’ French nickname. Whoever was charged with operating the “expansion” franchise grasped grassroots engagement. Two of Quebec’s premier francophone universities are now U Sports (similar to America’s NCAA except for the cash and the graft) football powerhouses. I was well established in Alberta when the Second Coming of the Als was made manifest by the launch of an on-trend cartoony logo – sort of Woody Woodpecker raging on expired Soviet Olympic drugs.

Culture shock in Canada is a lot like a board game. You roll the dice. Should you move one province over you’ll find yourself in a milieu you’re accustomed to and yet something inexplicable is awry; it may be the streetcars and skyscrapers, but no, that’s not it. If you hop a string of provinces, you may wonder if you’ve landed in a different country. I migrated from Quebec to Alberta in 1990. The hardcore passion for Canadian football I encountered on the Canadian prairies stunned me.

The Edmonton Eskimos (now Elks) and Calgary Stampeders entertained fanbases whose cores had coalesced around VE Day. Broadsheets, tabloids, AM radio and television stations treated football as hockey’s equal: experts, analysts, talking heads, beat reporters and columnists. Those types of people now toil for the football team’s social media feed, an information source as reliable as Pravda or The People’s Daily. Cutesy nicknames and sports jargon, very in-crowd yet very necessary. A casual Edmonton Journal reader would never know the Elks exist, let alone the baseball Riverhawks, thoroughbred racing and university athletics. This is the state of the aptly named Postmedia newspaper chain. And there is little else beyond traditional print. Local legacy electronic media outlets are dimming or already dark. Static and snow. 

Genuine word of mouth will trump an orchestrated marketing campaign every time. And there is no better sports marketing tool than a winning record. The Elks were at home on a recent Saturday. An early game hosting Toronto’s Argonauts. That’s when football should be played, in the afternoon. And the morning promised the first nice Saturday we’d had in Edmonton since the summer equinox. No rain. No nighttime prime time TV ad rate grab and no American cable football competition this time of year.

We were sitting on the backyard patio. The al fresco Saturday crossword’s ass had been collectively kicked. I was feeling frisky. I said to Ann, “I’m tempted to go to the football game this afternoon.” Ann said her interest was Elvis Costello, less than zero. Who would I call for company? “Nobody we know cares.” Check that. My friend Glenn would, but he lives in Burnaby. Glenn and his wife Margaret are certified and genuine football fans. The BC Lions should shower them with team swag – provided they keep their season ticket account current. I met Glenn in CEGEP, Quebec’s corral between high school and university. He was the sports editor of our college paper. I drew a comic strip and reviewed albums. We got to know each other at bedtime – pasting up the tabloid for the printer: hot wax, rollers, X-Acto knives and ruby tape. The four of us had dinner together on a Saturday in 2018, a Grey Cup eve. Glenn and Margaret were in Edmonton to attend something like their twenty-fourth CFL championship game. And more power to them for the extremity strangling excitement of freezing in the November dark at Commonwealth. That was the last time we hung out. There was no point calling long distance to float an inconvenient commute when I was already running late.

I caught the train from the Crooked 9’s neighbourhood station to the stadium. One direct line, just like the shopping channel. I was neither molested nor murdered or otherwise accosted. I was the only rider absorbed by a real window. Human desperation and architectural crimes. A grotesque tableau. Framed cinema verite. Despair and Brutalism: not so incongruous. The Edmonton Elks game played out as something of an impromptu shot of vitamin EE.

The concrete desert surrounding the stadium proved misleading. The lower bowl and the interior concourse teemed with modern life as I view it through a jaundiced lens: unfortunate fashion choices and tattoos. An engaged Elks executive must have been ecstatic over the crowd’s diversity and demographic. My impression was that CFL football had become something akin to YouTube episodes of The Rat Patrol, a fleeting distraction for old and hopelessly sentimental white guys like me. A family can afford a big day out at an Elks game. Better days are right here right now even if Woodward’s Knothole Gang barely qualifies as a wisp of memory.

My seat was in section FF. I never sat in it. I watched perhaps a half-hour of football from various vantage points. Had Glenn made the trip, he’d have been annoyed with me. I am my mother’s son: “Mary Riley, Mary Riley.” People watching and private investigations were infinitely more interesting. Mom lost her filter toward the end and I wonder about the integrity of my own. I lapped the stadium. I lapped up the highlights of the scenery. I try to remember that life is like a men’s toilet, you best just stare straight ahead at nothing. But, man, this innate need of mine to know. Mary Riley, Mary Riley.

The monopolistic premium atop concession prices for stuff you can buy cheaper almost everywhere else was modest in the way a $9 can of Heineken registers as reasonable. Do I add a tip at a concession stand? Am I a miser? Or am I just fed up with post-covid nickel and diming? The correct action which may or may not be proper these days eludes me. Take ten points. Is that enough? God, shut up and walk on.

I wondered on my wandering whether I’d encounter a green and gold bleeder, a football fanatic from nearly four decades ago; a former acquaintance, a friend and colleague I used to know. Would I recognize them? They would be wearing a faded green home jersey harkening back to the club’s original nickname. It won’t fit quite as comfortably as it once did and the brand of that season’s Official Supplier of the CFL will be defunct or tragically unhip: Starter or Puma. I can’t speak for other people, but me? I haven’t changed a bit.

Most sports venues have a no re-entry policy. Smokers are required to enjoy their entertainment in a mild state of agitation. Housefires, wildfires, cancer – smokers are the usual suspects. And fair enough in a wilfully blind and sniffy way. I look down on other people for other reasons, mainly zealots and other self-righteous types. And idiots. Especially idiots with power. We’re all a bit uppity, I suppose, a level above our natural grade and incapable of accepting our cosmic angle of repose.

Gates 7 and 8 at Commonwealth are directly behind the north end zone. Heavy duty fencing restricts access from the street and parking lot. This was the pariah pen. The surprisingly large space was some sort of torii beckening a benign and benevolent state of Zen emission bliss. I could smell reefer. The private security guards in their snazzy black uniforms looked smart and looked and sniffed the other way. A beer hawker made her rounds through the high mass. She was diligent restocking her tray.

Back in 2018 Glenn presented me with a custom Grey Cup badge since pinned to the bulletin board above my writing table. Its main purpose is printed on it: ALWAYS SOCIABLE. It served as a goodwill token for his travelling circus of BC Lions fans upon their arrival in Edmonton. A cheery souvenir freely handed out to fellow visitors, fans of rival teams (God bless the rapidly depleting core of Baltimore Stallions fans and the Atlantic Schooner fantasists). I view professional spectator sports in the way I’ve listened to Foreign Tongues; it’s no Let It Bleed although I remain enamoured by the very idea of the Rolling Stones. I am glad they still exist in some form. I enjoyed my football Saturday afternoon even if the full four quarters and the score (the Elks ran it up, way up, in the second half) didn’t matter. I felt at home in Commonwealth, comfortable in the company of strangers. Mary Riley, Mary Riley.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

The Summer of Disbelief

Ann has three weather apps on her iPhone. I have one that functions fairly well on my geriatric iPad Mini whose operating system is beyond upgrading because planned software obsolescence wades in the same muck as disposable consumer durables; some kinda cooked up job. Anyway …. We compare the competing forecasts every morning before selecting the one we’d prefer for the unfurling day. Sometimes the digital world jives with the real world, it just don’t jibe.

There was a time when weather reports were no-nonsense, straightforward stuff. Temperatures were absolutes. Windspeeds were described as gusts. Sunny or cloudy skies. Rain or snow. Step outside and have a look. Make your own call. Be a cat – conditions may vary between your front and back doors. The UV Index became a forecast staple around the time Helios switched ultraviolet rays from a source of Vitamin D to melanoma mode. Sunbeams are now right up there with cigarettes and delicatessen meats. The newer Air Quality Index attempts to quantify why a noontime summer sky may resemble the fantastical jacket art of a used science fiction paperback.

“Rain” is one of my favourite Beatles songs. I’ve been singing that one under my breath these past eleven weeks. Ann has a better handle on the lyrics than I have, she knows the lines about the sunshine. This was the summer Ann and I decided we’d stay put and enjoy the season in our town. Little did we know it would be one for the books. Not one for a Polaroid album of warm memories so much as a compendium of photojournalism detailing flooding and broken trees. Neighbourhood weeping tiles and sump pumps are working overtime. My informal theorem of twelve lawn mows between Victoria Day and Thanksgiving holds, but only because the window of opportunity is the size of an iPhone screen. Mushroom grow in the tall, very green grass and they intrigue me: “High or die?” Best not to know.

The constant rain has been manna for mosquitoes. We have been infested by one or more of their 3600 species. I’ve been dropping poison pucks into our rain barrels and the murky pools of standing water in the lane behind the Crooked 9. This summer’s horde of bloated bombers sport horizontal stripes on their abdomens. Because I’m partially a product of my leisure pursuits, their markings remind me of the Allies’ D-Day aircraft recognition paint, bold black stripes on a white field. Equally confounding is insect absenteeism. I’ve not had to hang a wasp trap from our Ohio buckeye because there haven’t been any buzzing around this year.

Neither Ann nor I are gung-ho handymen. We manage to get chores done in our own time. Burnt-out light bulbs are a fine example. We treat them as psychologists would. Do they really want to change? I don’t procrastinate so much as gird. That process, getting my head around things, can range from hours to weeks. Sustained delay sometimes allows for things to sort themselves out minus any impetus from us. But last weekend we managed to refinish our two backyard patio picnic tables. The job was supposed to be completed before the summer equinox. The lag wasn’t laziness. We were waiting for a dry, bug-free window. Like wisdom, it was a long time coming. Then we just effin’ gave ‘er, eh bud? The refurbished tables were intended as useful surfaces for the weekend barbecues we’d planned to host. We’d anticipated our grandkids playing tee-ball and kicking around a cheap commemorative 2026 World Cup football whilst screeching like Yoko Ono. I pre-girded for that future scenario by purchasing a pouch of No Future rosin gummies. Five to 10 milligrams provide a pleasant fog of benign, almost Zen acceptance of chaos.

Endless rain has put something of a damper on sectors of Alberta’s ever-lengthening wildfire season (Alas, other provinces and territories are bearing more brunt). And the dog days of August never really wallop Edmonton. Mornings dawn as imprecise as the number of wasps I’ve counted so far this summer; single digits give or take one or two. The chill following thunderstorms and thundershowers creates fog heavier than the worst hangover over ever with the precision of a special effects machine. The fog doesn’t descend or roll in. It materializes as suddenly as the puff of smoke from one of Mysterio’s flash-bang grenades in a 1967 Spider-Man cartoon. Tuesday morning Ann and I flicked our Bics at each other on our front porch. Rustled sections of the grey, now camouflaged morning newspaper: “I’m over here, about two feet to your right.” The distance between us had never been an issue before.

Fire and rain. This ain’t James Taylor. This is climate change.

Although I keep a couple of scribblers upstairs, the basement of the Crooked 9 is my preferred place to write. It’s a solitary, immersive space. The décor inspires, spines of books and music on the shelves. Something of a elephants’ graveyard of non-trending paper. Thousands of pages of paper and reams of card stock which must remain dry. When I write and the words don’t come, or when a particular word I’m seeking eludes me, I pace. I have a route. A guaranteed stop is inspecting the collection tank of our portable dehumidifier. This summer its low voltage electric motor has been pushing the envelope of its limited warranty.

I usually place the unit in the doorway of the furnace room which is at the bottom of the stairs. A central location with a smooth concrete floor. When I’m in there fussing with it, I can’t help but take stock of our cache of furnace filters. This summer has been something of an abstract, a convenient noun for an informal grouping of consecutive months. Winter, inevitable, is never so obscure.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Our Tuesday Night Beer Club Dinner with Billy Budd

Our waitress said, “You three guys look like dads, smart.”

Stats Guy and I exchanged glances. Ted, an actual father of two teenagers, raised his eyes from the live meteororological radar app colouring his phone’s screen. And she looked like a woman no mere boy would dare mess with: black, dead caterpillar eyelashes, an impossibly tight black t-shirt sporting an impossibly distorted 49ers logo and tattoos running up her legs from her ankles into salacious speculation.

One of us said, “Uh …. And how are you?”

The Tuesday Night Beer Club has its usual haunts. Stats Guy calls it “the rotation.” One of us always picks up the entire tab. I lose track of who was last and who’s next, not Stats Guy. We patronize particular preferred places, pubs where we’re not invisible to staff and where sports TVs are muted. A modicum of attention and a lot less noise. Perhaps we’re fussy, grumpy or even persnickety.

Stats Guy is something of a snob. Billy Budd’s is strictly south side slumming. It’s situated at a busy intersection with too many lanes to count. It’s a neighbourhood draw, it’s a low-rise industrial area draw. It anchors a strip mall and its fellow businesses purvey pot and liquor (the rubber stamp store space is vacant). There’s a kitty-corner storage facility, and a hotel-hockey rink complex across the street. I wonder how Herman Melville would score in the endless digital quiz game. There are more televisions than Best Buy and Costco combined. Enough pool tables to support recreational leagues; VLT’s and off-track betting; booths, banquettes and tables. The food eschews pretension and associated prices. A decent Monte Cristo sandwich is a rare flightless bird. And none of that soda cracker-thin pizza crust. Side salads are always crisp and fresh. And the men’s toilets? Given our standard Tuesday night rotation, they are Fairmont hotel lobby quality. Beyond blessed relief, all things considered. I may be somewhat impatient, delicate and pretentious, but I’m no a snob.

This Tuesday we figured we were under the gun. Another colour-coded Old Testament thunderstorm approaching. What’s a cubit, Lord? Ted, our American refugee friend, used live in Indiana, Tornado Alley. He’s said he never imagined those conditions this far north. Climate related PTSD is alive and well. We figured Billy Budd’s was a sensible choice, the nearest place in the rotation to get home from.

How was she? A few irritations, she said. Namely mosquitoes.

“That’s a hundred thousand irritations,” I said.

“How come there are so many?”

Stats Guy said, “We’ve had the wettest summer on record. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water. They can survive for as long as a decade; they’ll hatch when conditions are right.”

I added, “The City doesn’t spray for them as much as it used to.” Recalling one of our more idiotic city councillors who advocated nature taking its course, I added, “Bats and dragonflies are their natural predators.”

“I saw a dragonfly today!” she said.

“Of course,” Stats Guy said, “the bat population has been decimated by white nose syndrome.”

“What’s that?”

Stats Guy continued, “It’s a fungus that disrupts their internal clock. They starve to death.”

“How do you guys know all this?”

“We watch the news,” Stats Guy replied.

“We read newspapers,” I added.

“Like delivered to your door every morning?” she asked.

The three of us occupied a square table for four. Ted was to my left. His head was down, the brim of his Under Armor cap obscuring his eyes. He seemed to be absorbed by the oversize menu which hid the rest of his face. I saw his shoulder twitch, something stifled. Beyond him, through the plate glass window, I watched the sky steadily blacken over The Brick mattress store, the Lush sex shop and Latina Cantina.

I said to our waitress, “You know, if you’ve the time to scroll social media, you’ve probably got time to read or watch something, um, a bit more informative.”

“All right, smart dads, what do you know about the census? Someone came to my door and said I’d be fined $500 if I didn’t fill it out.”

Stats Guy said, “Do you own your home? Are you the head of the household?”

She said, “I’ve owned a house since I was nineteen.”

I said, “Whoa, that’s tremendous. Good on you.”

Stats Guy said, “Then you’re legally obligated to fill out the form. The short form takes five minutes.”

“There’s a long form?”

“Have you never filled out a census?” Stats Guy asked her.

She said she hadn’t. “What’s the point?”

I said, “The government doesn’t ask much from Canadians.” I continued, “Accurate statistics help inform policy. There’s a code on the notice you received. You just go online, it’s easy. You may wish to get on that, save yourself some money.”

“I lost the paper.”

Stats Guy and I said, “Ah.” ("Coke on you! You owe me a Coke!" Except I don’t drink the stuff.)

Our waitress poised her pen over her pad of paper. “So, what will you have?”

Ted said, “I haven’t had a chance to look at the menu. Can you please give us another few minutes?”

The window flashed electric blue like a black and white television with a blown vacuum tube. We heard the thunder crack. One of us said, “Here it comes.” Oh well. Just another delay on a night like tonight. I couldn’t decide between a hot dog with Swiss cheese and sauerkraut or pizza toppings into a baked sesame submarine sandwich loaf. Nothing but killer calories and time to kill.                     

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Talkin’ Camrose Blues

The Turquoise Bridesmaid complained about her 34-year-old bones as she shooed her son inside the Days Inn by Wyndham to be halfway useful in transforming the lone conference room into a wedding venue. Part those accordion walls! The frames of her glasses and her hair matched her gown. She was a striking figure on an asphalt stage, the ass-end of a Circle K as a backdrop, a dumpster and a near-distant Kal Tire sign standing in for the sun. She was smoking; we both held burning cigarettes in the baking humidity. I reminded her not to upstage the bride. “Oh, it's just my sister,” she replied. “And it’s her second one.” I said, “If that’s the case, go for it.” 

Ann and I had returned to “The Rose City” or “Cambrosia,” the setting of her high school years and first year of college. Those formative years, the big important ones. In literature and film Camrose is that small town which forces the hero to choose between growth or petrification – should I stay or should I go? I’ve come to know Camrose slightly, what with funerals or reunions short a few attendees. And a couple of Ann’s old gang even remember my name when prompted. I’m no different: “Yes, of course! Nice to see you again …”

This particular weekend sojourn was goosed by curiosity; the 2026 Camrose Blues Festival, evidently the second annual. We’d heard of three of the nine acts and had heard their music on CKUA. The ticket prices dated from Y2K. Maybe the machines really did stall in rural Alberta? (My first bar bill stupefied me: $8 for a bottle of water AND a proper swilling cup of locally brewed draft beer.) The real festival hook for Ann and I was the venue, the refurbished princess of Camrose’s “historic” Main Street.

The gilded and grandiose interior of the Bailey Theatre still suggests the smell of vaudeville greasepaint clinging to the ageless dusty mustiness embedded in the draped red velvet curtains. There are echoes of Social Credit bible-thumping political stumping. Errol Flynn dashing around in synthetic Lulu Lemon leggings and felt Glerups elf booties. There’s an Elvis movie on the marquee sign. The old doll’s crumbling Edwardian exterior was given a slick black and white Art Deco makeover in 1940. The façade reminds me of the theatre on the cover of The Song Remains the Same – the packaging the highlight of the movie’s soundtrack (and the film, frankly). And Led Zeppelin is relevant here because around the time of the band’s debut the blues in all of its iterations sank into the now standard tedium of elongated, painfully extended displays of six-string virtuosity.

The Days Inn on Highway 13 – Ann and I still call it the Norsemen, a name which reflected the Scandinavian roots of the region’s white settlers – was a festival “silver” sponsor. Billeted musicians were easy to clock at breakfast time in Hagar’s Café. Tattoos, black t-shirts and pork pie hats really pop in contrast to the practical sartorial preferences of wizened local folk and Camrose Police Service constables in their smart uniforms.

Our hotel presides over acres of paved-over farmland. Its closest neighbour is Duggan Mall, a contentious 70s development that strangled Main Street. Judging from the existing signage, the space now houses what must be a massive medical clinic. Duggan was once on the outskirts, separated from downtown by Mirror Lake, Camrose’s signature topographical feature. Newer big box retailers plunked on both sides of the highway subsequently choked out the mall. Ann and I were amused that the local Canadian Tire store, a mere unwalkable Las Vegas Strip block way, was more convenient to us than any of the chain’s Edmonton locations. We just happened to be in town.

We both enjoy poking around the Peavey Mart when we stay at the Norsemen. “The rural lifestyle store!” It’s across four lanes of highway, sort of close by because there’s a traffic light. I’ve never seen catch-and-release coyote traps on sale before. A bargain at $129.  Immense sacks of chickenfeed were on special too. The “-cide” aisle also intrigued me, “insecti-,” “pesti-” and “herbi-”: serious Silent Spring stuff, none of that woke Scott’s Weed-B-Gon like I use on our urban lawn.

Our next stop was Harley’s Liquor Store, one of the festival’s designated “friends.” I bought an eight-pack of low-cal, low-carb, low-alcohol beer strung together by a recyclable cardboard collar. The young clerk said the cardboard tended to disintegrate in a hurry. Would I like a bag? And I was eligible for the senior discount – Ann spoke up on my behalf. The clerk was intent on passing the time of day in a friendly way. I was intent on a discreet chilled tin outside in the parking lot beneath the big hard sun. No dice. A major portion of the parking lot was being resurfaced because Harley’s new neighbour, a boutique medical device store, obviously required a wheelchair ramp before its grand opening.

I said to Ann, “Christ, we’re not in bad shape for our age.” Ann said, “We didn’t spend our lives on a working farm.” I said, “Ah.”

Outside the Bailey on a smalltown Saturday night, killing time and smoking cigarettes between sets, we encountered a man whom Ann knew in high school. He’d been a grade or two ahead of her. His knees seemed to be reliable in 2026, no bow-legged semi-crouch. He introduced Ann to his wife as “former Camrose royalty.” Ann’s father was a prominent lawyer and later an Alberta circuit court judge. I’d met this Mr Snark once previously. Funeral or reunion? Pick ‘em. That time he said Ann used to “swan around town like she was Joni Mitchell.” Which means Ann, coerced to play her violin for Glee Club performances and later a member of the Lutheran College Choir (We have the live album from their Scandinavian tour – honest to God) used to lean into open muscle car windows to chat with every other boy except him on summer Saturday nights. Nothing like a blues festival to remind one those little town blues don’t go away by themselves. 

These days there’s a NO U-TURN sign at the foot of Main Street. The key to the highway lays in another direction. But the Turquoise Bridesmaid, though a bit put out, frazzled even, seemed happy enough there.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.