A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Railway Hotel

“Vertical integration” was not a business plan catchphrase for Canada’s nineteenth century railway builders even though the hotels they owned and operated were pretty much annexes to their stations. So conveniently located; we’ll take you there.

These grand castles speckle Canada’s urban geography, colossally distinctive picture postcard landmarks. Most of them opened for business before or shortly after the First World War. Out west, the Empress overlooks Victoria’s inner harbour; there’s the eponymous Banff Springs; the Palliser in Calgary which hosted my grandfather and father for a Great Depression night before they boarded a train back to Montreal (Dad spent an early teenage summer working on a relative’s farm near Penhold, AB). Up here in Edmonton, Ann and I enjoy a drink from time to time with the Fathers of Confederation at the Hotel Macdonald bar; their portrait, a stiff and formal painstaking reproduction, takes up almost half of one wall.

Quebec City is archaic, the only walled city on the continent. Perched on a cliff, its skyline is dominated by the imposing Chateau Frontenac. I don’t see Parliament and the Clock Tower when I think of Ottawa. I see the grey Chateau Laurier looming over the Rideau Canal locks. The Laurier is home to the now infamous Karsh portrait of Churchill; the sort of place that just begs a caper or a heist. Railway hotels are monuments to nation-building, the stitching together of an impossibly big country with creosote and steel, or, conversely, hulking, ever-present reminders of the perceived failures of colonialism and capitalism. These stone establishments have hosted heads of state and royalty of both the rock and sovereign sort. No surprise then that some of them offer their guests ghost tours, peeks into their mustier attics, alcoves and crannies.

A hotel isn’t a destination. But one can cast a lure beyond a convenient location. When some weird retrovirus was just a rumour from Wuhan, two column inches on page five of our morning newspaper, Ann and I booked a stay in Toronto. We lined up baseball (Red Sox), theatre (Come From Away) and concert (John Hiatt with Lyle Lovett or vice versa) tickets. We booked the Royal York on Front Street across from the Beaux-Arts Union Station, itself a national historic site. All of our planned events would be within walking distance from our digs in a palatial railway hotel. That trip, like so many other plans I’ve made in my life, didn’t quite work out.

I’m intimate with a few Canadian cities and towns. And I’ve always felt comfortable in the less familiar ones. Local accents and slang can sometimes take some adjustment, a keener ear. Pace is a key variable; should I amble, mosey or stride to get in step? I know Toronto as a jigsaw, pieces. I used to enjoy the train ride from Montreal’s Gare Central to Union, anticipating hanging out with friends. Those activities were usually (un)focused. And there was a time when I could just turn up at Dorval Airport with a few hours’ pay in my pocket and board an hourly Rapidair flight to Toronto Island. On business trips later in my life I tried to get out and about as much as I was able, but time was always tight.

Comparisons are facile. Like internet listicles. Toronto is not Canada’s New York City. Toronto is what it is, best not to affix a label. There’s a frenetic dynamic on the reclaimed shore of Lake Ontario. Bay Street is undeniably the epicentre of Canadian commerce: lawyers, traders, CEOs. Skyscrapers and everything, all of which generates a fifth of Canada’s gross domestic product. Ridings throughout the Greater Toronto Area swing federal elections. Its eclectic arts and culture scene, amplified by the concentration of legacy and alternative media outlets in the city, have cast undue influence beyond the boundaries of the GTA while defying the casual perception of Toronto (and Ontario) as an uptight Protestant, Loyalist place.

Ann and I spent four nights at the Royal York in late September. We have friends there. Every Canadian knows somebody in Toronto. It’s a big town, but welcoming and walkable. And I needed a hit of Major League Baseball and there’s no fucking way we’re dipping south into the United States anytime soon.

The Royal York’s lobby was a perfect setting for my other life to frolic: 

I’m seated in a comfortable wingback chair, its positioning subtly reoriented to better observe the reception desk and the comings and goings at the Library Bar. The Library is a flash joint, Bay Street’s bolt hole, cocktails available for twice the minimum wage; financiers and lawyers toast each other’s backs. The hotel’s main entrance, situated between them, is beneath my line of vision. It’s twelve wide steps down to Front Street from my perch. Twelve steps. They never quite worked for me, up or down.  I’m wearing a fedora, the brim low enough to obscure my eyes. My suit is finely tailored, perhaps overtly shiny in places. The jacket’s bulky enough to hide the bulge of my snub-nose .38. I’m not quite down on my luck, but making a living is a boom or bust grind. My legs are crossed, knees not ankles. The straight razor in my scuffed blue suede shoe is close at hand. I appear to be reading a newspaper. I peer around it and over it as I turn a page. My cigarette burns down in the heavy brass ashtray stand. It marks the minutes as precisely as the lobby’s signature feature, the great circle of life ticking away. Time is a traveller’s essential commodity. We are all travellers. I’m staking out the joint, acting on an anonymous telephone tip. I was on a case, a fresh file with few leads and a tangle of disparate threads. Patiently on the trail of a phantom, doing the legwork. Killing time – and only time this time, I hoped, but you never know in this business. The morning’s baseball standings had blurred from simple statistics into chaos, Dixieland into Davis, when I clocked her. She rose like Venus from the sea on the arm of a uniformed doorman. A woman like her? I’d paint every perfectly proportioned inch and handmake reproductions. She just might be worth dying for. She shot a glance in the Library’s direction. The bar hadn’t reopened for happy hour yet. Well, well, well, it’s always about money when you get right down to it; greed for somebody else’s. And that cryptic phone call? The snitch had had more of a handle on the case than I did, but mine was getting awfully big.  I snuffed my cigarette and folded my paper. Time for room servicing.

A pile like the Royal York warrants half an hour’s exploration, investigation. I grew fond of the Reign bar. The canned music was brutal, careening between post-war crooners and insipid modern pop, but there was a fine local pilsener on tap. I’m never alone in a hotel bar. I usually have a Hilroy exercise book to scribble in. The act of writing also deters random interaction with other drinkers. I needn’t have worried at the Reign: phones. No material for me, I can’t overhear a scroll or a text. Ann and I were in the Reign one night winding down our day. Ann ordered a starter, two sliders to share. The manager decided its delivery was nine or twelve minutes too tardy. He charged us for the food but waived our beverages. We know where the margins are in hospitality; his gracious illogic mystified and pleased us. Perhaps we were written off as spillage.

On one occasion I left the Reign for a cigarette in the company of pariah smokers booked on luxury motorcoach tours and the lost and crazy souls on Front Street. The Royal York’s main entrance features two heavy revolving doors. Manual, large brass PUSH plates, quarter wedges, two in, two out, counterclockwise. A fellow exited into the foyer just as I arrived. I was to the left of the door. I hesitated. I assumed the person behind him would close the window on my slot and, anyway, I’d obstruct their exit. The door stopped turning. The circle was broken. The person behind him was a young Asian woman, face in her phone, working it with both thumbs. She was somewhat stunned to encounter an immobile sheet of thick plate glass. She, like, totally dropped her arms, just, like, totally WTF!? I should’ve been gallant. I should’ve done my part, a push from my open segment to ease this poor woman on through. I didn’t. I guffawed instead, House of Windsor horse teeth. I circumvented my filter. I raised my voice: “C’mon! You can do it! It’s not so hard.” Fucking self-absorbed retard. Noses always appear overly bulbous in selfies anyway.

For the record, Ann and I did depart the Royal York for longer than it takes to smoke a single cigarette or double down on a second; for hours at a time. Honest.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Road Trip Bandwagon Rider

My first published short story (1984) was baseball themed. When my past decides to present itself in my head, I do enough cringing and cursing without having to reread The Rites of Spring; its very title a wretched cliché. I remain enamored with baseball. The numbers and statistics the sport generates don’t grab me so much as the idea of it and the wonderfully written ruminations the game’s inspired.

The last major league games I attended were in Chicago. I saw the Indians once and Oakland twice. White Sox, a southside weekend. The Indians are now the Guardians and the A’s are headed for Las Vegas (although they’ve only made it out to Needles – or somewhere so far). It’s been a while.

When Stats Guy and I convene the Tuesday Night Beer Club we always talk baseball. We remember the AAA Pacific Coast League Trappers and the subsequent CrackerCats, Capitals and Prospects. We enjoy Edmonton’s current baseball iteration, the short season, collegiate level West Coast League Riverhawks who play in our fine little ballpark beneath downtown’s bluffs on the flood-prone flats of the North Saskatchewan River. Baseball is a live sport. The second-best experience is radio, picturesque.

My dream game would be the Cubs hosting the Cardinals, a sunny afternoon at Wrigley and none of those dumb looking City Connect marketed merchandise uniforms. I’d like to see the Red Sox at Fenway against an established American League team, a club with some history like the Tigers. Stats Guy and I have been planning a baseball road trip together for more than a decade. Maybe we just book Denver or Minneapolis? Direct flights; although when I conjure the Twin Cities, I don’t imagine baseball, no, more Mary Tyler Moore, Prince, the Replacements and Soul Asylum. Maybe we should go see the ex-Expos in DC and catch the Orioles too? Maybe …

Ann knows I’ve been itching for seats at The Show. We’ve talked about a long weekend in Seattle. A place where we don’t know anybody else and our only obligation would be the time on our game tickets. But for Ann and me (Stats Guy too), travelling to the unravelling republic south of the Medicine Line strikes us as a form of implicit endorsement. That just won’t do. I mean, the clown car administration running my province of Alberta is embarrassing enough, but we’re just one Canadian province. The American clown car is a massive, huge duct taped wreck; it’s bad, it’s nationwide. Ann said, “Our only viable option for the next few years at the least is Toronto.”

I pulled up the Blue Jays’ late September schedule near the end of August. The most attractive game to me was September 25, the Thursday night finale of a three-game series against the Red Sox. The Friday game against Tampa did not appeal because the Jays would be decked out in their dreadful black City Connect uniforms. I want to see teams in their proper laundry. And who cares about Tampa unless the club relocates to Montreal to Ouija board the Expos? The Rays were out of the mix anyway, but the Jays and Bosox weren’t. That game would matter.

Me, a native Montrealer, I never hated Toronto’s baseball team as much as I hated (and still hate) its hockey team. The Expos and the Jays played in separate leagues. There was no interleague mix and match back then. I saw the Jays twice (Twins, Tigers) at the old Exhibition Stadium on Toronto’s windy summer fairgrounds. It was Twilight Zone baseball: unfamiliar rules (the designated hitter) and strange teams.

Rogers Centre is a hangover from a different era, a multipurpose, multisport stadium. A bit like Phil Collins, huge in the 80s. I watched a football game there once, the 2007 Grey Cup championship; I can’t remember who was playing. Maybe Winnipeg? The Jays organization has since poured millions of dollars into the concrete pile. Its guts have been transformed into a baseball-only venue, with more renovations to come. They’ve done a great job to date. The illusion was real, Ann and I were in a major league ballpark. Should be at least another five years before the Jays begin snuffling around the public trough seeking cash for a new stadium.

Pro sport is an industry, a sector of the entertainment industry. The ultimate marketing strategy is winning. When a club is a contender, in the mix as playoffs loom, it becomes the face a city presents to the rest of the continent. There’s a palpable energy throughout town – even the batshit crazy street people pick up on the vibe. The parade of secondary revenue stream passing our hotel on Front Street was credit card manic: every conceivable iteration and design of Jays caps, hats, t-shirts and jerseys. Where did you get those baby blues? 

I went with the flow. I bought a solid blue cotton ’47 Brand logo hat. I like them, they fit and fade well. The Jays are not the Expos. I must confess to a few minutes of moral consternation. Poor Ann in the store, tapping her foot and staring up at the ceiling as if she was reclined in her dentist’s chair. But how can you betray the dead, the defunct? Some righteous snot will preach about memory, but the truth is the departed won’t ever know and no longer care.

The visitors wore traditional grey road uniforms. The Boston Red Sox looked like the Boston Red Sox even if I couldn’t identify a single player. The Jays have inflicted some horrible logo and uniform aberrations on their hometown fans since their inception, but they got their costumes right this particular night, white pants, blue tops. The ceiling cracked before the first pitch. The stadium’s roof opened. The downpour didn’t hit until we were leaving Rogers Centre afterward. And that was okay, my new hat needed a workout, a working in.

Newspapers don’t publish box scores anymore. Through the first three or four innings of the game I figured the tell-tale sign of a Jays loss would be LOB – runners left on base. The game changed in the bottom of the sixth. Toronto loaded the bases the way good and lucky teams do: an infield error (an errant throw to first) and a walk followed by a HBP – hit by pitch. The next hitter may as well have been crime novelist Dennis Lehane: Gone, Baby, Gone (1998). A grand slam.

Aristotle posited that theatre, comedy, tragedy, what have you, requests and requires those in the odea to suspend their sense of disbelief. When that two-strike pitch went up and over, I forgot I’d paid too much money to watch a corporate asset. I forgot that the players in the game were making more money for one night’s work than I ever netted in a single tax year. I forgot that I’ll never have instant access to a doctor who will fussily attend to a blister on my finger. I forgot too how much the Jays were charging me for each tin of mass-produced domestic beer.

This blog post is running long, a baker’s dozen or so beyond 1200 words. Your lab rat social media-eroded attention span is scratching at the walls of the maze. There are no distractions with a Crooked 9 dispatch, no advertising, no sound, no pictures, no animation. Taking in the scene at Rogers Centre, I realized baseball lacks the confidence to sell itself, the game’s intricacies and nuances. The night was all about the “in-game experience”: the relentless high-definition scoreboard assault, the disc jockey and her dance troupe. Place a wager in real time. Somehow the Jays managed to squeeze in a game.

I’m mildly appalled by how much Ann and I enjoyed ourselves.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available. 

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Before the Fall

September has always been my favourite month here in Edmonton. This year’s stretch to date has particularly fine. The sun is noticeably lower, yet the days have been unseasonably summery. Overnight temperatures have yet to drop below double digits. The river valley is green and gold, its foliage blemished with crimson and burgundy. The sky is clear, a hardening sort of rainbow spectrum blue – that ethereal perfect world shade.

Mornings smell different this time of year. The air’s that much crisper, chillier, a more efficient conductor for those first whiffs of decay. I’m usually on the Crooked 9’s front porch by seven with my first mug of coffee to savoured with my first couple of cigarettes; sweatpants, and a t-shirt under a buttoned flannel shirt, maybe two flannel shirts, and a baseball hat always, a grimy Red Sox one of late – it fits better after a haircut. It’s still too dim to go through the morning’s Globe and Mail. The sun won’t rise for another ten or fifteen minutes.

My morning reanimation requires three jolts: caffeine, nicotine and grey broadsheet columns of existential dread. The Gathering Storm has been on my mind of late. The title of the first volume (published 1948, 667 pages) of Churchill’s exhaustive history of the Second World War. The set on the shelf of the living room library table here in the Crooked 9 was my father’s, first editions passed on before they could go astray. I’ve read four and a half of six volumes. They’re not a grind, Churchill is an elegant writer, although Len Deighton’s 1993 account, Blood, Tears and Folly is thousands of pages more concise. But I have to turn away in days like these because I’m observing far too many contemporary parallels. History is cyclical (we never learn) and conditions seem ripe for a repeat.

The sun rises anyway. 

The neighbourhood dog owners are out, the ones that don’t hire a service. Many of them are gesticulating shouters. Stuff stuffed in their ears; iPhones held in front of their mouths like Catholic communion offerings. I overhear one side of many conversations. Real life soap opera drama at this hour. The dogs think they’re starring in Taxi Driver: “Are you talking to me?”

Meanwhile, Canada geese, silent all summer long, are stirring, honking about their traditional travel itinerary. The noise they make come autumn is discordant, something as jarring as emergency vehicle sirens at dawn. Funny. When I hear them begin arriving in March, their sound seems much more musical.

Winter and God knows what else is coming.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Where’s the Party?

October isn’t just the title of U2’s second album. It’s municipal election time in Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta’s two major cities. The 2025 twist is that Alberta’s United Conservative (UCP) government has legislated something of a social partisan experiment, party politics trickling down into municipal chambers between provincial election cycles. Mid-terms, if you will, to borrow a common phrase from south of 49. The UCP’s quasi-libertarian ideology demands groupthink.

There will always be an electable loon at any level of the democratic process. Alberta’s two big towns have traditionally been run by councils populated by independents. This dynamic encouraged debate and discussion. No quarter, no givens for the mayor’s agenda. There’s a valid argument too that the system encouraged built-in inefficiency. Sometimes a certain degree of collaborative corruption is required to get things done.

The UCP’s grasp on power is becoming tenuous. Alberta’s demographics are shifting rapidly. The party’s grassroots support is aged and rural, augmented somewhat by a socially-regressive lunatic fringe infecting the body politic like measles. Three-quarters of Albertans live in or in-between Calgary and Edmonton. Calgary was always viewed as conservative and corporate. That generalization no longer applies. The city is trending young and progressive now, mirroring the capital – referred to colloquially as Redmonton. Times and sentiments are changing along the Highway 2 corridor.

Municipal politics are rarely dusted with glitter. The fundamental realities are policing, potholes, transit, wastewater and garbage collection. A majority of Canadians live in cities. Revenue streams in Canadian cities are dammed up. Every city relies on its respective provincial government for a significant portion of its operating funds. Cities are where ignored or unaddressed social problems, the remit of a higher jurisdiction, manifest. And snow removal. Such a seasonal budgetary surprise in a winter country. Somehow, we plow on.

My perception of party-driven municipal politics is largely informed by film and literature: Chicago Mayor Daley’s Democratic machine and New York City’s equally infamous Tammany Hall. United States stuff, but God knows American foibles are not deterrents in UCP Alberta. They’re aspirations to be sprayed on, some kind of goofy, righteous stencil.

Montreal is an island, literally and figuratively. My hometown is my lived experience with municipal political parties. Mayor Jean Drapeau’s Civic Party ran the place. City council pulled this way or that, but always together. Montreal is an international port. Bridges to the mainland are federal infrastructure. The Civic Party would cooperate or fight with Ottawa – whatever suited the City’s perceived self-interest. Montreal was often too diverse and cosmopolitan for the provincial government. The Civic Party would cooperate or fight with Quebec City, especially the Parti Quebecois government because the spectre of separation was bad for business. When Drapeau finally stepped down in 1986, it marked the end of the big city, big boss, big influence era in national politics (Kudos to Toronto’s Rob Ford for giving old school methodology another shot, but crack is whack, kids).

Bill 20 also grants the UCP government a couple of incidental snit powers. The Banshee of Invermectin’s regime is free to fire Calgary and Edmonton councillors it doesn’t like and permits it to overturn municipal bylaws it disapproves. This from a party whose election platform was erected on complaints of federal overreach. Autonomy for all, but more for some. I can smell the Animal Farm sty. To date, UCP ministers have displayed an alarming propensity to fumble real-life files; unshredded papers on the legislature floor. There are four health ministers. Four! They’re all unvaccinated…. Kidding!... I hope. Best to conjure phantom issues and solve those. Better optics. And best to mute your biggest, heftiest critics any which way you can: salt Calgary’s and Edmonton’s city councils.

Ann and I have not played Scrabble at the dining room table for quite some time. That’s on me. I need talcum powder to ease my ass kickings and I can’t buy it anywhere anymore. But we’ve got a new game here at the Crooked 9 come October’s civic election. We’re going to play Whack-a-UCP Stooge. Kick ass. Municipal ballots also include Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) trustee nominees. Ann’s a retired teacher. I’ve always ticked her recommendation (I requested a Catholic ballot once, held up the process in the elementary school gym for a quarter hour while the scrutineers hunted for one, only to find the nominee was acclaimed). This fall we’re hunting humans, seeking those who would ban books, those who fear critical thinking. Alberta cannot afford another generation of automatons, morons. They’re in power already and loath to cede it.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available. Both titles are distributed to the trade through Ingram. Order them from your favourite bookshop.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Perfect Day (Time Is Relative) at the Beach

YYG is a tiny airport, homespun, no jet bridges. When Ann and I landed in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island a couple of weeks ago my unfettered imagination pictured us on grainy celluloid as we descended the boarding ramp, our lower joints operating a tad too stiffly: characters in Casablanca or The Year of Living Dangerously. Intrigue. Romance. The heat wave hit us before we reached the tarmac and the painted pathway leading inside, as hot as Morocco or Indonesia. And the humidity. We Edmontonians always forget what we know about the climate of eastern Canada. Man, you can vape a proper lung dart. Ann’s hair frizzes and frazzles Medusa crazy, doesn’t take more than a moment, but I can never look away.

My sister Anne and her husband Al collected us outside the arrivals area. We drove forty-five or fifty minutes to Baltic on the isthmus, ten minutes past the town of Kensington. I always conjure PEI as a green place, gently rolling hills of neat, square fields that remind me of Sussex in the south of England. This time unirrigated portions of the island appeared as brown as the expansive prairie south of Edmonton in autumn. It wasn’t just the stubbly gold of harvested hay fields. We’d never seen PEI like this before, under orangey skies and spotlit by orange sunbeams.

New Brunswick across the Northumberland Strait was alight with wildfires. We could smell the smoke. Ann and I are familiar with that scent. The government of PEI had declared a province-wide open fire ban. Residents of western Canada, Ann and I are intimate with fire bans; not our first rodeo. Sparks don’t fly, they drift on air currents like dandelion spores. Wind is friction, hot air and cold air meeting and rubbing each other the wrong way. Burning hotspots create windy micro weather systems. Hurricane Erin, still some distance to the south, was also agitating prevailing air currents.

Though not quite Genesis, on the third day of our stay the four of us decided a dip in the ocean would cool us all down.

When I was a kid my dad would drive our family down from Montreal to Kennebunk, Maine for two weeks of summer holiday. His parents rented the same cottage for the same duration every August. Dad’s sister and her family would join us. Eventually my older brother and sister Anne demurred, other things to do with their free time. Our last summer there, my future stepfather arrived accompanied by two of his four daughters. We kids were friends and remain close (and I liked my stepfather although there was a bit of friction at first). You don’t know what you don’t know. Me? I was in Red Sox country and the beach was maybe fifty yards along the coast road, a rustic cabin candy store facing it. Purple shoelace licorice! Very exotic. I don’t eat sweets now, haven’t for decades, but I still love baseball.

We packed the car for the short drive to Branders Pond on the Gulf of St Lawrence, a north shore beach: towels, camp chairs, a giant umbrella (missing a screw and jury-rigged with a bent nail) and a couple of reusable bags filled with sundries, sunscreen, sunglasses – what have you. I was not overly enthused. This was an excursion I wouldn’t be able to walk away from, head back to a rental unit when I desired a change of scene. I can’t begin to imagine the confining hell of an extended beach holiday at some warm weather resort compound.

My idea of a good time at the beach is walking into the surf, stomach sucked in, working up the nerve to submerge my testicles and then working up more nerve to dunk. Then I find a depth I’m comfortable with, one that lessens the odds of drowning. I wade around, my knees bent, duck walking like Chuck Berry or Groucho Marx. Ann prefers more of a butterfly stroke and she tends to hum the theme from Jaws. Immersion is enjoyable for fifteen minutes or so. Returning to shore is always a hallucinatory experience. I can see the ripples in the sand, they’re awkward to step on. And the foamy line of the gently lapping tidewater always seems to crisscross them, never align. I’m learning to walk all over again. Once I stagger from the sea, I’m always twenty or thirty yards to the left or right of my towel, it never seems to be where I left it. As soon as I dry off, I’m ready to leave.

Branders Pond, in Queens county, is accessed by a crooked footpath through grassy dunes. The sand is red, rusty. The sandstone cliffs of the cape are red, rusty. If Mars had an ocean, this is the shore. At low tide, a beach walker will see the caverns and recesses the relentless surf has hollowed out of the cliff bases. Their dank interiors are as smooth as the inside of a robin’s nest. Branders Pond is one of PEI’s hidden gems. I’ve not been able to find it on one of those infernal internet “Best of” lists. Still, this beach, like any other, is no place to spend a day.

The wind was up at Branders Pond when the four of us sought heatwave relief, higher than my blood pressure when I rant about Alberta politics. The camp chairs wouldn’t remain upright no matter how much we tried to weigh them down. The umbrella was auditioning for a Mary Poppins revival. We lasted less than an hour. The primary function of our beach towels was lining the car’s seat upholstery. It was glorious; a perfect day.           

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond goofy. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors. 

A FAN’S NOTES

Ken Dryden 1947 - 2025

There’s a photograph that says everything to me about how good the Montreal Canadiens were in the 70s and how good their netminder knew his team was. It’s an iconic shot in its way, as evocative as “The Flying Bobby Orr” or bloodied (and surely concussed) Rocket Richard shaking hands with the enemy, Boston keeper Sugar Jim Henry.

This photograph was snapped at the Forum in the mid-seventies. It’s taken from the corner, the Canadiens’ end. The perspective is elevated, maybe ten rows up, not a bird’s eye view. Goalie Ken Dryden was a tall man. In this shot he is standing upright in front of his net. But not the pose we’re all familiar with; that one.

Directly behind the net is Buffalo’s Rick Martin in full flight. Martin was one third of the Sabres’ lethal French Connection line (Gilbert Perreault, Rene Robert), a habitual 40-goal scorer.

Canadiens’ senior Big Three defenceman Serge Savard (Guy Lapointe, Larry Robinson) is in the foreground. He’s the puck carrier pursued by Martin, but he’s two strides ahead of the Sabre. Savard is parallel with the goal line, just a few feet away from Dryden but already looking up ice. There will be a breakout pass or a 200-foot rush. Whatever Savard’s decision it will be the right one. It will not go wrong. Play will move into Buffalo’s zone. Fast.

Dryden’s trapper arm is resting on the crossbar. The net is a living room mantel and he’s at a cocktail party, just taking it in, checking it out. The living room carpet will need vacuuming tomorrow. He’s not even hugging the short side, leaning up against the post. In an immediate, uncaptured future moment he will clean house, use the blade of his paddle to dust the ice chips and snow from his crease.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond comprehension. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Bak 2 Skool in Albertie

Those books you’ve banned, have you read them? 

The remarkable quality of free will is that it grants you the ability to either shut the fuck up or just fuck off. But overarching ignorance and negative engagement, like tolerance, are choices. I don’t care what aspect of a book offends you. But don’t you dare take offense on my behalf or anyone else’s.

Alberta’s government, lead by the Banshee of Invermectin, Premier Danielle Smith, amended the province’s Education Act last month; home schooled Christians cracking down on sexually explicit ink on paper in school libraries (toilet stall graffiti exempted). The poorly worded ministerial order was itself mildly salacious reading. It also required already overworked (and underpaid) teachers preparing for another term in overflowing classrooms to catalogue the books in their home rooms.

The Edmonton Public School Board’s (EPSB) response was a master stroke. It released its own list last Friday of more than 200 noncompliant books it would need to cull. Among the literary masterpieces was the once popular paperback Jaws. Now, fifty years ago I saw the movie and read the novel and, for the life of me, I can’t recall any graphic drunken monkey hot shark sex. When there’s fuckery about, it needs to be amplified, shamed and embarrassed. Premier Smith sniffed that the Board’s reaction constituted “vicious compliance.” But hey, rules are rules as unclear as they are written.

Remember, this is the same woman who said her Alberta Sovereignty Act could’ve been invoked to challenge Ottawa’s banning of plastic straws had it existed at the time and who, at a closed-door United Conservative Party (UCP) townhall, informed a chemtrail-obsessed conspiracy theorist that aviation is a federal jurisdiction – her sole concession to the Laurentian elite, that mysterious deep state cabal in eastern Canada whose usurious exploitation of the federal transfer payments system constitutes extortion. Also, that wildfire that devastated Jasper National Park? Ottawa’s fault.

Alberta’s UCP government is a shrew, hectoring, complaining. And it’s akin to a fiction writer, it makes things up. Competent administrations don’t conjure issues. They create policy to address current ones. And really competent ones look ahead, anticipating and maybe even pre-empting future issues or at the least, unintended consequences of immediate legislation. The EPSB leveraged the UCP’s own inadequate rhetoric and flawed ideology against it. Brilliant. Take this diktat and shove it up your clenched “trad wife” asshole. Educators are critical thinkers, a diminished fundamental skill in elected public service. The government is back on its heels over an issue of its own making, literature it needn’t have fretted about in the first place. The book ban has been paused.

Labour Day has come and gone. The Canada geese are stirring, making noises about flying south for the winter. The kids are back at school. A new year. There’s a nip in the air. Alberta skies are a crisp crystal blue, except for the black thunderhead on the horizon. Alberta’s teachers are prepared to strike. They’ve a noble cause, more resources, more support and more money to keep pace with inflation and the burden of hidden work. The government is prepared to lock them out. I can’t help but wonder if there was a more pressing file on the premier’s desk other than shark snogging and shagging.   

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Roadside Attraction 

My sister and her husband have owned a farmhouse on Prince Edward Island for so long that the locals are no longer suspicious of these Montrealers. My own visits to Canada’s smallest province commenced about twenty-five years ago when they were already well established. How the years rush on by. Memory tracking is as challenging as maths. I’ve stayed with them for a summer week five, maybe six, possibly four, times.

There is a haunted mansion in the nearby town of Kensington, on Victoria Street. Ann and I have driven past it more times than I can count because a little farther on, about the length of a Canadian football field (including endzones), is Frosty Treat, an ice cream stand. Ann enjoys a chocolate-dipped soft serve. Me, I’m more of a “Jack and Diane” type, tube steak boogie.

The Haunted Mansion has intrigued me for years. It’s an immense Tudor style structure, three storeys. The entry sign features a life-sized green ghoul, a hunchbacked, tuxedoed butler. I love carny kitsch. And thanks to a strike by Air Canada’s flight attendants, we had the time to investigate. The bonus for our hosts was that we vacated the front porch, making our selves scarce for a few hours. 

This roadside attraction, elaborate as it appears, will never be mistaken for a Disneyfied land or world. Its dark, meandering halls, including an ersatz Jack the Ripper, Victorian London street in the dungeon, are peopled with fibreglass and papier mache (the ‘e’ needs an accent, but I don’t know how to do that) monsters, villains and Lizzie Borden in a wardrobe. Corny animated special effects, scratchy recorded screams and threats, sudden blasts of compressed air: early twentieth century funhouse mechanics. Ann and I felt our way through the corridors and rooms. We were petrified because much of the flooring was unintentionally untrue and my partner in thrills was wearing sandals and I’ve got arthritis in my right big toe (high school football) that sometimes sets my skin aflame.

The attraction’s backstory is that a certain Englishman, one Dr Jack, built the mansion as an inn for travellers. They checked in. They checked out without ever leaving. Spooky. 

Laughable jumps and frights, at discounted seniors’ admissions. As Ann and I crept around, I couldn’t help wondering about the availability of replacement parts. Record pressing plants experience the same problem. Same with venerable and elegant printing presses manufactured in a different era. Vintage cars, bicycles and motorcycles, Kenmore household appliances. Friction wears down metal, rubber, plastic. Anything that rubs. I hope the Haunted House’s enjoys jury-rigging its machinery as much as Ann and I enjoyed holding hands and giggling inside its walls.            

 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Stuck In Transit 

About forty minutes outside of Edmonton I felt the WestJet flight begin its descent. My ears popped. Ann and I had been aloft for four and a half hours. The Crooked 9 beckoned. Our own bed. More importantly, a merciful cigarette before we collected our checked luggage. Then the pilot announced that WS 619 might be diverted to Calgary because another aircraft was disabled on the YEG runway. Fortunately, he added, no one was hurt.

I didn’t care about other people in that moment. Oblivious to the elderly woman seated by the window and sharing my armrest and the litters of children in rows in front, behind and beside us, I said, “Fuck!” Possibly a titch too audibly. Our homecoming was already a week behind schedule.

We had flown Air Canada earlier in the month to Prince Edward Island. Our intention was to spend eight days with my sister Anne and her husband Al at their farmhouse overlooking Darnley Basin (the view from our bedroom window, including the billowing curtains, was essentially Wyeth’s Wind from the Sea) in Baltic, about ten minutes from the village of Kensington. Ann and I had not been east for a few years. Our national airline, a former Crown Corporation, blessed Ann and me with an extended stay.

You ain’t nuthin’ but a waitress in the sky. Evolving nomenclature has rendered the Replacements and Coffee, Tea or Me? moot. Air Canada’s flight attendants walked off the job protesting ten months of fruitless collective bargaining. Their union then defied a federal back-to-work order. Ann and I got jammed on departure day. The sticky issue was, in industry jargon, ground pay. We did not realize that flight attendants are akin to disc jockeys, paid for air time only. To us, should you be sporting company laundry, whether you’re in an airport concourse, a jetway or a jet, you should be paid for your time. Too many jobs come with hidden duties outside of the official Human Remains description. We’ve all been there. And the union had a lever: domestic travel demand has exploded due to the sorry state of affairs south of the Medicine Line in Trumpistan. It’s no crime to play the hand you’re dealt.

We were inconvenienced. And discombobulated because Ann and I always flip our switches on the day before we’re scheduled to leave someplace else. We start packing. But we were also serene (a state I visit too infrequently). There was no hotel room to vacate. No panic. Just more time to be had on a front porch overlooking a beautiful garden featuring trees named for my brother (Bob’s ashes in the root ball) and my father. Anne said our mother might get a crab (Ha!). My sister and I are the last of our immediate family. Old stories retold from new perspectives; time has passed, a generation is passing. Careening conversations, rants and wit amid sublime company. Al the scientist concocting Margaritas and Corpse Reviver No. 2s at five o’clock.

It's not hard to be a good guest, of course it really helps if you’re welcomed. Ann and I have a strategy. We contribute any way we can without disrupting our hosts’ established routines. Ann cooks. I clean. We try to blend in, otherwise we stay out of the way. We never turn up with special needs, rockstar riders. Diet? Yeah, we enjoy eating. Let us look after this restaurant meal or grocery order. No demands. No complaints.

Ann is the rational half of our dual dynamic. The sensible one. Following the pilot’s announcement, she checked the WestJet app on her iPhone. All YEG outbound flights had been delayed by an hour at least. However, the airport authority declared that the runway would be operational by nine p.m. The time showing on Ann’s phone was eight-fifty. We were cutting another unexpected and much more unpleasant stranding awfully close. 

Most of my advertising career as a production manager was illusory: I under-promised and over-delivered. I suppose my three failed marriages were the reverse. I asked a passing stewardess (Sorry!) if she’d heard any insider information from the cockpit. So polite, so gracious, such an enchanting know-nothing smile. That cigarette dangling in front of me had become some sort of twisted cat toy. An additional hour to dwell on an unavailable nicotine hit. Then I thought, “If I was running Edmonton International, I’d broadcast 'runway clear by nine' knowing my emergency crew would and could do the job by eight, eight-thirty. Give us all a little space to maneuver, unlike these expensive last-minute economy seats.”

Hitchcock never made a movie this suspenseful.        

                                      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors.

NONSENSE VERSE

The Long View 

Bushnell :: Bushmills

Farsight :: Insight

Focused :: Unfocused

Crystal vision :: Double vision

Stare into the distance

The lens doesn’t matter

Stereo :: Mono

Landscape :: Hellscape

Exterior :: Interior

What’s that :: What’s next

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer* (Just between you and me, SOC has been an utter stiff). Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Date Night 

Ann leaned her shoulder against mine to whisper, “We’re surrounded by whiteheads.”

I’d been peering around, taking in the tableau. Our fellow theatregoers were all getting on. Some struggled with mobility issues. Others were too heavy for their height. The theatre itself was beautiful, brick walls crisscrossed with massive wooden beams anchored with iron joints. Our seats near the top were very close to the stage. I was thinking stairway railings were right up there with cup and mug handles, epitomes of functional design. I was reminded of the gallery of grey seats which hung at one end of the old Montreal Forum. Didn’t matter if the person in the row in front of you was wearing a stovepipe hat, the slope was almost vertical. A long way straight down.

Ann continued, “We fit right in, I guess, but I don’t feel as if we do.”

The play we saw was Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple which debuted on Broadway in 1965. The Edmonton Journal graced this local production with a rave review. That surprised me because the Journal these days pays more attention to Kim Kardashian press releases promoting her signature products which aspire to the stratosphere currently inhabited by Goop and orbiting vaginal stones – I digress. You know the play’s premise: Oscar and Felix, best friends, one slovenly the other fastidious, both divorced, attempt to live together.

I came of age in the early 70s watching the television sitcom on a black and white portable TV with tinfoil scrunched onto the rabbit ears. Jack Klugman played Oscar. Tony Randall played Felix. Oscar had a pretty sweet life, I thought. Drinking, smoking, gambling and writing about professional sports in New York City. There was at least a decade of delay before I finally saw the 1968 film starring Walter Matthau (Oscar) and Jack Lemmon (Felix).

The Odd Couple trifecta realized in reverse order. Enjoying Wednesday evening’s performance (I can’t name the actors, I didn’t keep a playbill), it struck me that I was now older than Simon’s characters and had lived through similar life experiences. I understand the script had been updated somewhat to reflect the mores of 2025 although the only difference I could discern was more slapstick, enough to make clear to the overly touchy and sensitive contingent that The Odd Couple is a comedy of its time. But, you know, a good joke or witty remark however old or whatever its subject needs no apology.

One aspect of The Odd Couple disturbed me, triggered me, made me cringe. Felix’s irrational compulsion to clean, straighten and tidy – all ups – summoned the ghost of my big brother Bob. He nicknamed me “Heloise” after the syndicated columnist who proffered helpful hints to homemakers long before social media life hack memes. It was not a compliment, more an observation. My friend Stats Guy still zings that sobriquet at me from time to time. Other friends call me “Martha Stewart.” Now that Ann and I are grandparents my inner Felix is in overdrive, turbo-charged: I’m no whitehead, I AM FELIX! It’s no gift to see yourself as others might.

The Varscona Theatre is a nondescript building. Its exterior suggests a Nissen hut, something you’d see in a war movie. Its interior is something else, done right, seed money well directed. It’s a staple of the Old Strathcona Theatre District, home to the Fringe Festival each August. Adjacent back alleys have been repaved and power-washed into inviting patio or meeting places amid the dumpsters. The exteriors of the surrounding walls feature murals or flaked and fading ads for long-forgotten commercial brands and services. There’s a jazz club nearby which backs onto Canadian Pacific Railway end-of-steel. A perpendicular boundary of the district is Whyte Avenue, one of those hip main drags whose vibrancy ebbs and flows with playoff hockey and the red or black ink in Alberta’s financial ledger, still too dependent on the price of oil. Whyte Avenue, like Fremont or Bourbon, is one of those streets that look better at night. A film director shooting on location would want to firehose the pavement, reflect all of the lights and signage in a black mirror. Moodiness to evoke either glamour or noir, script dependent.

Ann and I shared a light supper before the performance, an array of tapas. We’ve found that when we dine out, even if it’s just a pub lunch, the nature of our conversation changes when we sit facing one another. There’s no space for the commonplace at a table for two. Upcoming appointments, chores and errands give way to speculation about the fate of those ancient but comfy chairs in the den. What about a sectional instead? New furniture would be different, disruptive – we’d have to dispose of the old stuff and I’d have to repaint the room. Nightmarish, and anyway I've no complaints, always been content. Off topic, perhaps another trip? Where would you like to go?

Bodega serves the type of food Ann cannot prepare in our kitchen although I’m certain scrubbing her used pots and pans would be a lead-pipe cinch for my scour set. It faces the Princess Theatre across Whyte, shuttered since the pandemic. A late night showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show still camps it up on the marquee. Nestled between The Wee Book Inn and the gussied up Strathcona Hotel, Bodega occupies what has been a seemingly cursed, transient space since Elephant & Castle shut its taps something like a decade ago.

Elephant & Castle wasn’t just an overseas Tube station. It was a chain of English-style pubs in Canada. The Newcastle Brown tasted fine in Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton and wherever else. A reliable second choice or fallback. Conversely, if you were randomly teleported into any Elephant & Castle location, you’d have no idea where you were in Canada, an awfully big place. Bodega’s décor blurs lines, a mix of Catholic mission and Inquisition dungeon. Had Zorro wandered in looking to unwind with a bottle of red, I’d not’ve been surprised. The cunning fox would also have a cheroot clamped between his teeth, not that he could light it. Snuff that out, Don Diego, Cardinal Biggles has just arrived with bylaw enforcement. And they’re incensed. Bodega has no brittle surfaces, no fashionably modern minimalist pretension. Ann and I didn’t have to raise our voices as high as our flights of fancy.

We stole a moment in the dirt and gravel parking lot by the jazz club, shared a cigarette before the short drive home. Ann said, “We don’t do this often enough.” We don’t. I’m something of a hinderance. There is stability and comfort in everyday routine. And, saints preserve us, there are other people out there in public places. Mother of God, just look at them. But when we do change the backdrop, change our setting and scene, Ann and I have found that some of our fancies come to fruition. Sparks require switches.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors.

A FAN’S NOTES

The Boomtown Rats: A Bittersweet Appreciation 

My memories of the mid-seventies seem to dwell on desperately dire times. The music press’s consensus back then was that no rock band should or could have a lifespan longer than a decade or so. Key members quit or die. Others have troubles with alcohol, drugs and criminal code statutes. The Faces were disintegrating. I reckoned it was just a matter of time before the Rolling Stones shattered into scree. So. I casually began to cast my eye around for a new favourite, ear to the ground. The experience was eerily similar to attending a coed college after five years in an all-boys Jesuit high school. Lots to contemplate.

Some bands looked too stupid to be taken seriously, hair and costumes. Others were a bit too bombastic and flamboyant. J. Geils Band was a potential successor, a great frontman and blues hearts in the right place. I was devastated when they cancelled a Montreal Forum date I’d bought tickets for. Maybe Love Stinks aside, their studio albums never quite lived up to their live reputation (Blow Your Face Out, Full House). Aerosmith almost contended with their three-album run of Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic and Rocks (their best), but at least half of each of those albums was Zeppelinesque sludge – which is all right to doze off to when you’re picking at your chipped black nail polish and too stoned to roll.

Social media Sunday, 13 July 2025: Facebook reminds me that it’s been forty-three years since Major League Baseball staged its annual all-star game in Montreal’s Stade Olympique. A good night out in the right field bleachers, almost touching heaven but blocked by a pre-fab cement overhang. Sunday also marked the fortieth anniversary of Live Aid, the mother of all telethons: two concerts on two continents to benefit a third one, cajoled and pulled together by Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, an Irish rock band.

Rock music has always twinned its premise. Simply put, cars, sex and getting wasted are good; war, poverty, racism and oppression are bad. Live Aid was the absolute pinnacle of rock’s inherent idealism and its somewhat insidious role as a positive force in popular culture. The satellite broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” writ massive. Alas, there’s only one direction from peak toppermost of the poppermost. Live Aid was the last signpost on rock music’s golden highway of hits. More personally, existing footage documents the demise of the Boomtown Rats. The timing was tragically right, they’d been at it for ten years (The survivors, including Geldof, have since reformed and are marking their fiftieth anniversary with a European tour).

There’s a bulletin board on the wall above my round writing table. It displays what you’d expect, ticket stubs, pocket team schedules and the metal badges I used to pin on my jean jacket. The largest item is a 10”x8” black and white Mercury-Polygram promo glossy of the Boomtown Rats circa 1978. They look like a rock band, dressed a little differently from you and me and with better haircuts, but nothing ridiculous. Unforced, perhaps even uncalculated, cool. And the Stones appeared to be done, what with Keith facing down an extended tour of the Canadian penal system. And the Rats had, in my case, pedantic cachet: a double-barreled proper noun name lifted from a legitimate source (Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory) and easily abbreviated into a form of shorthand. If you said “the Rats” to somebody who knew, they understood you weren’t referencing the Good Rats or the offspring of Rat Scabies.

My first encounter with Geldof was in the pages of Trouser Press. I’d read the rest of the magazine. All that was left was an interview with some guy I’d never heard of. But he looked cool. This Irish fellow proved articulate, opinionated and contrarian. Hilarious too. He dismissed Springsteen as a pale imitation of Van Morrison and Thin Lizzy, a rip-off artist. I was in the record store the following day to pick up A Tonic for the Troops and the Rats debut, the cover of which showed a shirtless Geldof on his knees in a dingy hallway, suffocating beneath a cellophane shroud.

The Rats hit at a particularly fertile time for rock music. If you bought a record by a new artist in the seventies, I’m thinking Television, Police, Cars, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Clash…acts not in your older siblings’ collections, you were guaranteed to hear something different. The Rats were no exception. Their songs were urban stories (“Rat Trap”), gritty fables (“Joey’s on the Streets Again”) and slices of teenage wildlife ("Kicks"). Modern girls and death. The lyrics were like clockwork: clever, witty, ironic. I was hooked; I saw my future without the Stones.

My second encounter with Geldof was in real time, the radio perennial of “first caller through.” The Rats were playing the Theatre St-Denis that night, touring in support of their brilliant third album The Fine Art of Surfacing. I had tickets, orange card with black ink. CHOM-FM was Montreal’s English-language hipster station even if it was already exhibiting the early stages of corporate uniformity disease. Geldof was on air, promoting the show. CHOM did not play Boomtown Rats music.

(CHOM did not play Lou Reed either. The deejay hosting Geldof had previously hosted Lou in the same time slot. He introduced “Charley’s Girl” as Charlie’s Angels and, well, you imagine how the rest of the session went.)

Surfacing’s pseudo-North American hit was “I Don’t Like Mondays”, a song attempting to make sense of the senseless, a high school shooting in San Diego, CA. It was controversial at the time because school shootings in the US were not yet part of the curriculum. If the Rats released “I Never Loved Eva Braun” today (Yeah, I conquered all those countries/They were weak and I was strong/A little too ambitious maybe/But I never loved Eva Braun), their taking the piss with Hitler would be far too subtle; the hand-wringing outrage too easy to imagine.

I asked Geldof about his first encounter with Springsteen. In an elevator, an awkward moment for an Irishman with a big mouth. “He said, ‘Are you the guy who’s been saying all those things about me?’ I just sort of… I couldn’t deny it.” The deejay figured it was time to cut me off. Geldof said, “No, don’t. Let him speak. This guy’s interesting.” I was more engaged than the media professional. I didn’t feel like a college kid, my school paper's record reviewer aspiring to a university undergraduate degree in English and Journalism. No, I felt I was bantering with an old friend. I telephoned real friends afterward and gushed like “Mary of the Fourth Form”: “I spoke to Bob Geldof!” It was going to be a great night! I was already high. Years later I was crushed whilst reading his 1986 memoir Is That It? – the bastard had omitted mention of our call; must’ve been an editorial decision, you know, page count, printers’ signatures and whatnot.

I somehow made it home from that show (I would see them again at the St-Denis on the Mondo Bongo tour) with the record company 10”x8” promo glossy intact, uncreased. I remain mystified as to how (and the how of its pristine state some forty years later). The Boomtown Rats were the real deal. They did not go on stage as curious bystanders. Geldof was a frenetic front man, not particularly graceful. A roadie unlocked his cage at curtain. His hands were always very busy, emphasizing lyrics with exaggerated gestures in the manner of an unskilled actor (although he would go on to star as Pink in The Wall film).

How was I to know they were on the standard ten-year rock band plan? Their fifth and sixth albums, V Deep and In the Long Grass, were spotty, indifferent contractual obligations but not without a few gems amid the exhausted dross. They were done by Live Aid, placeholder filler on a very long and busy day. I believe I have all or most of Geldof’s solo albums; hard to find, generally ignored, but very good. He or they will always sell their latest album in this country – provided I’m aware of it. The Boomtown Rats will get their Hot Rocks treatment come September when a double retrospective is due. I suspect I already have everything on it, but I’m all in anyway – you know, new cover art, thorough liner notes and the sequencing might be interesting, even revelatory.

Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones are polishing their follow up to Hackney Diamonds. I don’t understand anything anymore. Not that I did then.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Sweet Victoria 

We spent most of last week down island on Vancouver Island. Ann and I flew ninety minutes west from Edmonton to hang around with her brother Jim and his wife Shannon. We made token efforts to present as utile burdens, good guests. One of those trips that’s more about visiting than sightseeing (although I did manage a couple of pints of Smithwick’s at the Irish Times). We knew that long before our bumpy touchdown. Other relatives and friends reside there too.

I had telephoned my high school chum Peter to give him distant early warning. He’d introduced me to what I consider “prog” way back then and some of that music has since stuck. His regrets were sincere. Peter and his wife were taking their daughter, a newly capped and gowned high school graduate, to Paris and London “before she hates us.” I laughed. Growing up in the olden days hadn’t been a complete fog.

But everybody else got together, three generations. The event was a performance by Majesties Request, a Stones tribute band. The event was staged at a pub called The Loft on Gorge Road. The Loft is atop a Days Inn. One of those travellers’ havens you’re desperate to checkout of as quickly as possible, no spare time to spend, no free day to waste away amid cinderblock and nylon. Where you can’t help but fret about the hygiene habits of your room’s previous occupants and the thoroughness of the housekeepers. Gorge is a ritzy street, until you drive to the other end and reach the Days Inn.

But isn’t that just dirty, lowdown of rock ‘n’ roll? The Loft’s walls were adorned with airbrushed images of Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison – you can picture black velvet renderings in Kresge, Woolworth and Army and Navy bargain basements, can’t you? The men’s room was a hive of miniscule black flies. I contemplated a moustache comb for my pubic hair. I ate a cheeseburger, relieved that the filler in the patty tasted more like cereal than emulsified abattoir floor scrapings. God, you know, sometimes bad food is damn good.

The Blushing Brides are Canada’s best, and possibly the world’s best Stones tribute band. I’ve seen them in every Canadian city I’ve lived in. They’re a fun night out every ten or fifteen years or so. The singer and the guitarist try to look like Mick and Keith. Sometimes the illusion is real. They strike the poses we’ve all seen as stills in the music press. Majesties Request had no such pretension. The guitarist resembled a member of Guns n’ Roses or Robin Zander of Cheap Trick. The drummer sang all the Keith songs and he sounded like Keith did in 1972 even though he wasn’t born yet. The hefty lead singer’s intonation and phrasing was corporate Jagger, more Stripped “Wild Horses” than Sticky Fingers, a slight nasal twang though not shotgunned to shreds. He was smart enough not to try on any moves.

I asked our friend Carol to dance. We’d caught up earlier in the week. This night Carol was at the wrong end of a table for eight, conversation was impossible. Out on the floor in front of the band, Carol asked me if I’d teach her to dance like Mick. I said, “You have to prance and mince.” Pout. Clap as if you’re deaf, fingers to palm up by your ear. When you strut move your arms like a flightless bird with broken wings. Thumbs forward for a waist clutch. If you put your hands on your hips? Profile only, curled wrists to bone. Point like any one of the nuns who taught us in Catholic elementary school, admonishing and angry. Jagger scolding is very different from Bruce Springsteen’s inclusive pointing. Twirl like a celebrated Soviet ballet defector (a high barre for Mick); James Brown and Tina Turner too. And pout. 

Carol was laughing on the dance floor. The Majesties Request singer was watching me, a bar band needs energy. I noticed a couple of senior ladies giving me long looks. That was the “it” or “thing” about Jagger in his prime: your partner was now forever inadequate; boy or girl; rebel, rebel.

I won a prize. Not for my rubber band man performance. No, for trivia. Who doesn’t know “It’s All Over Now” was written by Bobby Womack for his Chess Records soul band the Valentinos before the Stones turned it into a UK number one in June 1964. I mean, c’mon. The prize pack was Majesties Request promotional merch, lovingly packaged in a cardboard VHS cassette shipping box: a few stickers, a foam insulator for beer cans and bottles, and a ballpoint – black ink; disposable swag I loathed sourcing during my advertising career (Marla, God bless you wherever you are. I knew one call to you would keep my burgeoning insanity in check. Thank you!).

A random Friday night in Victoria. Family and friends, a pub, live Stones music complete with reminders of my obsession and career, and a pen. My life writ awfully small in a funny sort of way.         

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress or other online vendors. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Keep Calm and Ostrich On 

Personal trauma? Bury it. A troublesome corpse? Bury it. Evidence of corporate malfeasance? Bury it. Scandalous allegations of ineptitude, corruption, sex and graft? Bury them. Commissioned studies that don’t arrive at a desired conclusion? Bury them. Mountains of refuse? Bury them. Used radioactive metals? Bury them. Carbon emissions? Bury them.

We bury everything, including history. And just when I figured there was nothing left to bury excepting a few old grudges of mine, Alberta strong and free in all her majesty and an outlier on Canada’s political scene, is seriously contemplating burying water. But not just any kind of water.

Many commodities are buried too, they must be mined, quarried or dredged. Consider sand beyond Vaseline, beach volleyball and a sunny holiday. It’s the bed under a properly paved road. It’s in glass and concrete. It’s the abrasive in fracking fluid – which is mainly composed of water. Sand in some form is as omnipresent as water in your life. The manufacturer of your shampoo likely lists its main ingredient as aqua. When Nestle sells 500 mL of your own tap water back to you, it used way more water than that to produce its convenient plastic container. Clean water, like sand, is a highly valued industrial commodity.

Alberta is Confederation’s angry mini-petro state, a province with republican fantasies. The source of its mismanaged resource wealth and its tired boom or bust economic cycle is the tar sands, gooey fossil fuel deposits up north around Fort McMurray. Extracting heavy bitumen and gussying it up for further downstream refinement requires a lot of fresh water. When I wash the sand-based crockery here at the Crooked 9, I fill the kitchen sink with potable water though I wouldn’t drink it after my chore is done because I know my greywater is a tepid soup of detergent and diluted debris and, anyway, it would taste like McDonald’s coffee. I open the drain knowing it will be treated and maybe even come through my tap again one day. Tar sands wastewater is something of a misnomer. It’s liquid slag whose additives include bitumen, sand and chemicals. As sludgy as most of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue. It’s collected, pooled in artificial basins called tailings ponds. They tend to leak and their toxins tend to seep or spill downstream. They do look good from above, ask a dead duck.

A commission convened by the United Conservative government of Alberta to study the environmental impact of tailings ponds (something of a shock in itself) and chaired by the Honourable Member from Fort McMurray suggests one solution to dispose of mining wastewater is burying it. Naturally, the effluence would be decontaminated before interment deep within the earth’s crust. If that’s the case, I wonder why it’ll still need to be buried. Tailings injections bring us halfway to China and the world of Jules Verne, drilling down into impermeable rock. Suitable sites aren’t abundant. Proposed captured carbon storage sites compete for space. Draining tailings ponds will necessitate pipelines. The Universal Law of Wham! applies to pipelines as much as anything else: If you’re gonna do it, do it right, now! Pipelines are efficient conduits, but improper installation and neglectful maintenance are valid concerns because there’s a whiff of Boeing ineptitude wafting over past projects. And there’s no revenue in moving dirty water and no profitable payoff to be realized in goodwill.

Love Canal was neither a soap opera nor a porn flick. Evidence has surfaced showing fracking fluids will eventually permeate groundwater. Still in dispute is whether their highly pressured injection into subterranean rock fissures triggers earthquakes. So. What could possibly go wrong burying mining wastewater tailings?

I don’t know. I’m no cynic; I’m a realist whose brain is pop culture wired. All I can picture is that last scene in Carrie. Nothing buried stays that way. As for ostriches, I assume it’s best not to see it coming.                     

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is inane. I’ve no recourse, no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress. 

SUNSET OASIS CONFIDENTIAL

Jacket Required 

Sunset Oasis Confidential has been in the marketplace for about two weeks. A soft launch. No rapid unscheduled disassembly to report at this stage because nobody’s actually had a chance to read it yet – excepting Ann, my partner in crime and more innocent capers, who patiently reviewed and corrected six drafts. All of the informal feedback I’ve received is kudos for the novel’s striking cover.

I know a guy.

Rene is the principal of a boutique Calgary-based design firm called CreativeWorks. He’s an artist in his own right, three of his works hang on the walls here at the Crooked 9. I met him thirty-five years ago when I turned up for my first shirt-and-tie job in Canada Safeway’s Alberta Division advertising department. I noticed a package of cigarettes in his breast pocket (he’s since quit). Smokers tend to congregate. We liked the same music. I made mix tapes for him. He bought me a rare CD edition of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle while holidaying in London.

Rene and I are friends. I’ve divorced three times. He literally helped me move through two of them. And if there’d been a body, I think Rene would’ve been somewhat okay burying its bits and parts too. If there’s a cosmic ledger, I have taken more from Rene than I have given him. A reciprocity deficit. But we’ve also been freelance partners through the years: “I need some copy!”; “I need some design!” Rene designed the cover and promotional materials for The Garage Sailor and the print ads for Of Course You Did.

Because I don’t reach out to people I merely telephoned Rene. I asked him if he was up for another book jacket. He agreed. I said, “I can send you a draft, but you probably won’t read it.” He agreed. I began, “All right, here’s the short version: imagine guys like us, maybe a decade or two down the road, living in a retirement home…”

A book’s cover is as important as its title. Design is another device to intrigue a casual browser. The challenge is to suggest a book’s content by alluding to some aspect of the story, a visual prompt to read the summary or blurb on the back. Sunset Oasis Confidential. Together we broke down the title; Rene and I love type fonts.

“Sunset Oasis” is squirm-inducing name straight out of a twisted marketing brochure. A resort name in a winter city for seniors in the winter of their lives. Rene’s solution was a warmly coloured sans serif, like what you’d expect to see in a discounted sun vacation print ad. He then took the type and placed it over one of his own winter scenes which in turn echoed the Group of Seven references in the novel. The juxtaposition said everything.

“Confidential” was more problematic. It’s a word associated with detective noir, thrillers and non-fiction exposes. The graphic clichés are typewriter Courier and rubber stamp Stencil, usually red. I was thinking more about Jerry Lee Lewis and Rough Trade, high school. Music. “Stairway to Heaven” shut down every high school dance in my day. I said to Rene, “There are a lot of Led Zeppelin references in the book. Have a look at their wordmark. I’m sure it’s inspired by Arts & Crafts which, I believe, was based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s hand-written blueprint notations. Tell me what you think.”

Before Rene had time to put together a couple of composites, he wrote to tell me he wasn’t “feeling so great” and needed to take a few days off. The health care system here in Alberta (despite the efforts of support staff, nurses and doctors) is similar to its judicial system, best not to be involved if you can help it. I wrote back saying he’d picked a really inopportune time to die or become otherwise incapacitated.

When Rene’s comps did arrive, I was floored. In one of them he’d incorporated pretty much everything we’d discussed, wrestled with, and then overlaid that on a collage of magazine covers. Dated magazine covers. I phoned Rene. “You didn’t even read the manuscript!” The narrator’s best friend at Sunset Oasis subscribes to a slew of magazines. They provide a little backstory, a little flashback colour in their way. “How’d you know?”

“Old folks’ homes are like waiting rooms, there’s always old magazines lying around.”

As Rene shepherded his design toward final art (he reads production specifications, thank God), he had a little fun arranging the magazines’ cover images and their feature headlines. But that’s another story.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

*Avoid Amazon Canada as the pricing is beyond fucked. I’ve no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress.