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. 

SUNSET OASIS CONFIDENTIAL

Signed, Sealed, Delivered 

A new novel. Three years of writing: six drafts – a stack a little taller than two desktop printer stationers’ bundles of letter-size; reams of sometimes incomprehensible marginalia scribbled in red or blue ballpoint; a file folder crammed with notes, press clippings and examples of slick marketing materials; two title changes. All this paper tied up with string, shakily stomach-knotted with fear and doubt.

All right, here I go again on my own (Gratuitous Supertramp/Whitesnake mash-up, apologies, I’m not particularly fond of either band myself).

The premise of Sunset Oasis Confidential is simply “High School Confidential” in a retirement home. What I took away from many visits with my grandmother or mother in Montreal, and my former neighbour here in Edmonton, was mainly a sense of complaint. All inevitably sad, from the food to the company, from the childish level of rational discussion to the entertainment and activities. But in those places, I always found a modicum of humour even if it was of the tragic sort.

My friends have told me similar stories.

I remember trying to fit my mother in her wheelchair into a crowded elevator. Not a chance. As the doors began to close, I told its occupants, “It’s okay, we’ll take the stairs.” I slayed half the house, the second and third generation portion.

Nana Moore, my father’s mother was 99 when she decided to move into an Anglican Ladies Residence. She grew tired of cooking and cleaning. Nana took me on a tour of the lovely old building. She dragged her cane (Mom used hers as a pointer and a sword) behind her. She didn’t require it, but the staff insisted. Along the route we encountered an elderly woman maybe twenty years’ Nana’s junior. Nana stopped in front of her, blocking The Sound of Music video. This lady was slack-jawed, vacant. Nana said, “Geoffrey, do you remember your Auntie Agnes?” “Of course I do,” I (rep)lied (I did not recognize Auntie Agnes). “Look at her. She’s a cabbage now.” Nana gave Agnes a gentle tap on the shin with her cane. “Agnes! Maybe the doctors will give you a new head.” Agnes told me how much all the boys loved her beautiful red hair when she was a teenager. Nana said, “Let’s go.”

We sat outside together on the expansive verandah. Grey boards, white spindles, green railings. Looking north, I could just about see where Toe Blake’s Tavern and A&A Records used to be. Nana explained to me that her accountant had designated the Anglican Ladies Residence an institution for income tax purposes. And her eyes were faltering: knitting, crochet, crossword puzzles and Bridge were more difficult these days. Anyway, Agnes never was a good Bridge player.

The future is unwritten. I’ve been coming to realize that the future isn’t what it used to be. Late innings. And so I began to wonder what might transpire should I or members of my cohort end up alone in a retirement home. You can’t take it all with you, the books, the records and the Stones tour posters on the wall when you’re downsizing while your body and lifespan wither. On the other hand, memories, emotions and habits, good or bad, always weighty, will fit inside a matchbox.          

                                      

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.

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HUMAN WRECKAGE

Low Bars (Not Juke Joints) 

A few years ago I broke down, bought a new lawn mower, a battery charged e-tool. I knew the make and model I wanted because I’d used my neighbour’s the entire summer previous for Edmonton’s twelve mows from Victoria Day through to, maybe, Thanksgiving. It’s an efficient unit, mulching blades, 21-inch deck (Ain’t that a man?) and quiet. I can cut the lawn any time of day or night. My neighbour, Ted the American refugee, really likes my new mower, mainly because I no longer habitually putter around his garage.

We’ve had a little rain recently. Gentle, steady, welcome. The crabapple tree by the Crooked 9’s alley gate blossomed immaculate white. When I mowed the lawn last week, a sunny and breezy day, petals drifted down around me like snow flakes in a Hollywood holiday movie. Just for a moment the miraculous magic of actually existing had clarity, a sharp grace.

Just for a moment, because I had to pause every five feet to decapitate the yellow head of a dandelion. I swear to God the bastards have learned how to duck. I do not like them in our yard. Should one metastasize into a grey R. Buckminster Fuller dome of spores, I torch it with my Zippo. Unmoored spores can ride the wind for kilometres – or a yard over.  I spray dandelions with Killex on hot days when I know they’re thirsty, begging for moisture. I try to dig them out with an inefficient tool designed for the job; parsnip tap roots run deep (Dad used a bayonet. He cleaned eavestroughs with a nine-iron. Those are other stories). My preferred “Dandelion” is the B-side of the Stones’ “We Love You” 1967 single and that’s neither here nor there except that maybe a good song should’ve previously provided me a positive predisposition to the weed.

(Digressive, interrupting tangent ahead: It’s a bit of a stretch to describe the Stones’ psychedelic phase as particularly druggy because, well, gee. “Dandelion” is like a rainbow, an ethereal, mystical girl, “Ruby Tuesday” and a “Child of the Moon”. Their dreaminess may’ve been the fashion at the time, but every Stones ballad is surprisingly tender, something of a minor shock to the listener when paired with a snarling rocker.)

You are familiar with the “broken windows” concept of urban blight. Unreplaced, a single pane of shattered glass multiplies as quickly as social media memes. Thousands of broken windows now. A recent edition of The Economist examined the theory’s complacent corollary. “Public decay” suggests that ten broken windows are, for the most part, all things considered, better than a hundred. Declining civic standards are massaged into normalcy.

Take dandelions. Please. Edmonton’s boulevards and verges are rife with them. Public parks and playing fields are an unkempt yellow. The City’s indifference to its greenery is tacit permission to neighbours (not Ted) to stop maintaining their properties. Nobody seems to care. Weeds are good, make a salad, mix dandelions with kale. God, you know, if you spray dandelions somebody’s dog might get cancer and though dogs don’t vote, their owners do and don’t forget our friendly neighbourhood pollinators because everything’s connected (Note to self: Must hang wasp trap from Ohio buckeye) and, anyway, it’s “No Mow May” which is a bit like disease marketing’s “Movember” when men grow porn star moustaches in honour of their delicate prostate glands.

Everything’s connected, especially when fundamental baseline standards slip a few limbo notches. Canadian cities, most Canadians live in an urban environment, require more funding than property taxes, modest user fees and speeding tickets can provide. Political jurisdictions and responsibilities are web-like, complex, but everything that’s rotten shakes down onto the streets of the naked city. The transit authority’s underground train stations and bus shelters were never intended to be dual-purpose structures, homes for lost souls. Somebody in a higher level of government consciously and callously off-loaded that social problem.

Edmonton City Centre is a misguided downtown mall across the street from city hall. Thirty-five years ago I used to change buses out front. I’d go in frequently to buy transit tickets, cigarettes, do some banking and browse the book and record shops. I hustled through it the other day bent on delivering some documents to my accountant. I saw a lot of hoarding obscuring vacant retail spaces. I counted more security guards than shoplifters, let alone casual clientele. Christ, the anchor tenant used to be a Woodward’s flagship department store. This is the poxy face of public decay and the wreckage wrought, concealed by plain drywall. There’s no covering it up with decorative decals, snazzy graphics. Evidence of decline, of public decay, of a pervasive creeping laxity, is everywhere.

Edmonton is a winter city. Property owners are obligated to ensure adjacent public sidewalks are free of snow and ice. Up until last winter, every neighbourhood boasted a modest network of sandboxes, free grit to help citizens with their civic duty. Locating one now is an irksome treasure hunt. The City will no longer collect discarded live Christmas trees come next January, a traditional courtesy service. This is a small cut in a multicultural society, but I cannot help but wonder about that decision’s impact on service clubs raising funds to ease some other form of public decay. It’s annoying enough trying to get a healthy one home for the holiday.

Summers are short in a northern town, but the season’s days are long. Everybody’s outside, whether active or relaxing. Of course, the City no longer sprays for mosquitos, mainly because their natural predators, bats and dragonflies, don’t invoice. The invisible vise of authorized public decay is everywhere, compressed hours for public facilities like libraries, truncated transit schedules. The squeeze is applied inch by inch. There are 63,360 inches in the mile ahead. Most days I feel like we’re halfway there, sliding on down.       

                                      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.

THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT

“Stuck in Transit” 

Guideless and guileless tourists learn by experience. Eventually you learn to fit in by not standing out. The cavalier ignorance I’ve sometimes displayed in foreign places makes me cringe. As Ann has observed about our travels and life itself: “You don’t know until you know.” Her Zen aphorism reminds me of wisdom found in Genesis: “You’ve got to get in to get out.”

Calgary indie rock outfit The Muster Point Project has just released a new single called “Stuck in Transit”. The track’s rhythm guitar is evocative of Keith Richards bashing away at his blonde Fender. That unmistakable sound, chunky shards: you hear it weaving throughout Black Crowes music, in Tom Cochrane’s “No Regrets” and even in the delightfully sardonic “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” by Waylon Jennings (I would kill to hear the Stones butcher that one).

I wrote the lyrics to “Stuck in Transit”. I’ve co-written a few songs with TMPP’s Kevin Franco. Not many. Our working relationship is strictly part-time. It’s also symbiotic. These past three years I’ve been immersed in Sunset Oasis Confidential, my latest novel which is now mere weeks away from publication after drowning in two false starts and six drafts. I surfaced to clear my head from time to time, write a blog post or a set of lyrics for Kevin. TMPP doesn’t need any input from me. Kevin writes, composes and arranges his stuff. He did tell me though that my erratic contributions tick a box allowing him to concentrate on other aspects of songcraft. Sympatico. Our collaboration is so casual that we didn’t even pinkie swear because I live in Edmonton and he lives either in Calgary or south of the equator in Santiago, Chile. I never know where that boy is, but he’s not my kid.

I never did learn how to operate a motor vehicle. My rites of passage were confined to puberty, acne and metal braces on my buck teeth. I’m public transit savvy. Always had to be. Last June Ann and I touched down in Netherlands. A night flight to Schiphol. We took a train from the airport to Amsterdam Centraal. From there we were to ride a tram to our holiday digs inside the canal belt(s). We knew the tram’s number. We knew the name of the stop, Leidseplein. We knew how many stops to count before ours (I lost track once I spotted Velvet Records through the window). We bought tickets at the station. What we didn’t realize is that Amsterdam trams have dedicated entry and exit doors. They’re clearly marked by idiot-proof pictograms, but Ann and I were running on fumes and severely depleted nicotine levels. Nor did we realize you have to “tap” your ticket to get on or get off. I’d rate our experience as an embarrassment rather than a humiliating fiasco. Within twenty-four hours we were sniggering at other tourists. Everything was fine until Ann and I were trapped inside a grocery store, turnstiles with infrared receipt scanners this time. “What did you do with the bill?” “I don’t know.” “Is it in the bag?” “Maybe?” You’ve got to get in to get out.

Efficient public transit was top of mind with me upon our return to Edmonton. The City’s ongoing and worthwhile expansion of its light rail system remained a challenge for civic planners, contractors and commuters alike.

The songs Kevin and I have written together are strictly separate room entities. I don’t tell him how I hear the words in my head. “Stuck in Transit” was different. I had a common phrase and excuse for a title, usually Kevin decides a song’s title. I had an opening couplet straight out of My Fair Lady less the Spanish bit. I had a double entendre refrain that was Ann Zen as well. All the ingredients for a fantastical Chuck Berry story song. I wrote to Kevin saying I thought I’d written something very “Stonesy” (very different from Dylanesque) for him. The day before he’d finished laying down an instrumental track in their vein. He’d yet to write lyrics. Kevin told me my words just dropped, slotted into the proper places in the music. Serendipity.

The official TMPP video of “Stuck in Transit” is on YouTube. It’s compelling footage, you can watch Kevin at work. And it’s also available for download or playlist addition or whatever on all those streaming services I know nothing about.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Closing Time (There Goes a Regular) 

Monte sent me an email from the Lower Mainland. Our Calgary barfly friend Dave who had also relocated out that way was dead. Heart attack. I’m not sure how old Dave lived to be, but he likely had fifteen years on me. Monte’s message time warped me thirty years backward.

Hillhurst-Sunnyside is a walkable Calgary neighbourhood across the Bow River from downtown. There’s a C-Train platform behind the Safeway store on 10th Street. Nearly every diversionary attraction in town is easily reached by rail. Tenth boasted a record shop and a comprehensive newsstand, Sign of the Times. Kensington Road was the perpendicular, running parallel to the river. There was an art deco cinema, a book store and pubs. Many pubs, my favourites were an Irish joint called Hurley’s that billed itself as a roadhouse and beside it, a slightly lower rent place called Sam’s whose food menu featured delicatessen sandwiches to die for at a reasonable price (and exceptional potato salad). This was the neighbourhood where I chose to live after Canada Safeway transferred me from the Alberta Division advertising department to Calgary corporate.

Monte, a published author and Calgary Herald reporter at the time, was sort of the Nick Carraway of the whole scene, the observer. He liked barroom food but not the booze. He paid sober attention. Ultimately, he would edit and (with partners) publish my first two novels. They were utter stiffs, money losers that did not damage our friendship. Whether at the sticky bar of Hurley’s or Sam’s, Monte and I were well acquainted with the regulars.

Frank was a stockbroker by trade. He was the black sheep scion of a wealthy, well-known Calgary family. He’d seen the Stones perform in Amsterdam in 1970. He grasped the genius of Frank Zappa. He did not sip his Scotch. Had I a spare investment dime at the time, I would not have entrusted it to Frank. He was homeless at the time of his death, splitting time between his office and his car, a BMW. There’d been a cigarette fire in his condo.

Steve was something of a wraith, wispy hair, wispy man. He was in commercial real estate and would go on to form his own company, direct competition to his former employer. His new office digs were in the same complex of the ad agency where I worked. His best friend was Tom, an engineer who was as gruff and uncouth as Steve was refined. I once bumped into Tom at a nearby Husky, one of those gas stations with road trip amenities. His motorcycle was in the parking lot. I needed cigarettes. Tom needed hot dogs. He ate two in four bites as we chatted. I stood well back.

There were two Brians. “Bubble Boy” and “Picasso” as dubbed and differentiated by Dave. Bubble Boy was strictly dot.com, one of those near-autistic wizards; neuro-diverse today, I suppose. One fall he announced he’d secured a half-season’s worth of Calgary Flames tickets. He said, “I’m going to get into hockey this year the way Geoff’s into baseball.” That was the winter Tom hosted a pot-luck Super Bowl party for us barflies. Denver was in it. Bubble Boy brought a mound of chicken wings. I dislike eating chicken wings in public, you need the other end of the toothpick for your fingernails. Bubble Boy’s hot sauce was exquisite, rich and buttery. I said, “There’s something else in here, Brian. What’s your secret ingredient?” Bubble Boy said, “A cup of vodka.” Who needs water?

Picasso was a housepainter. He lived with his mother and in his white overalls. He was very well read. Picasso and I began an informal book exchange: trade and then pass on (excepting his hardcover collection of five Dashiell Hammett novels which I kept – and still have). Sunday morning brunch time at Sam’s, we’d sit like students in exams, sneaking peeks at each other’s grid. After I was out of that scene I risked hiring him for some work. I was relieved to learn Picasso was actually good at what he actually did. I admire that quality in a person.

And then there was Dave. A close-talking Brit whose conversation was often hilariously rude, complete with sound effects. He lived with Moppet his cat. Dave was a salesman. He could’ve sold anything provided sex didn’t arise in his patter. When I met him, he was selling dental materials, precious metals: gold for crowns, silver for fillings. Dave speculated in real estate. I wrote and arranged the production of a promotional brochure for a development he was scheming and dreaming about. It took a very long time for him to pay me. Another life lesson learned.

Dave once told me he’d served in the British military, including a stint with the elite special forces SAS regiment. Details were vague or unforthcoming after that reveal. Every barroom has a shaker of salt for good reason. But I did see him in action. His sexual innuendos had offended another patron sitting beside him at Sam’s bar. I sensed the tension barometer rising. I was paying close attention because I’d no intention of being an incidental casualty in a brawl. Dave stared at the fellow, maybe a nanosecond. Then the other fellow was laid out on the floor. I cannot tell you what I saw because it happened so fast; I’m guessing head-butt. Move along, nothing to see here.

No surprise that all these guys were single. I was the only married member of the group. Thing was, I didn’t want to go home to be alone either. I could empathize. And there’s the paradox of Happy Hour: are you aiding and abetting a failing marriage or planning your coping strategy for the inevitable? Cause and effect or vice-versa.

Monte moved to Vancouver a few years before I re-relocated to Edmonton. We’ve always kept in touch. When Dave left Calgary for the West Coast, the two of them renewed their friendship. A couple of years ago Monte informed me Dave wanted to speak with me, could I call him? I said, “Me? Why?” “He liked you.” “Oh.” “Also, he will probably ask you to lend him some money.” I said, “Oh.” I telephoned Dave anyway.

The frailty in his voice was not unfamiliar. I’d heard the same shaky timbre down the fibre-optic line in my father’s and my mother’s. Vocal c(h)ord wrinkles, there’s no disguising old age. We talked for quite some time, about the old times, about Frank, Steve, Tom and the Brians. Mercifully, the subject of money was not raised. It’s possible I deflected an angling introductory remark.

Dave my barfly friend is dead. Too many other deaths in my life have hit me a thousand, a million times harder. That Kensington Road period of my life ran overlong. Looking back, I confess to a lot of embarrassment, some shame and zero pride. We were a collective of inadequate men doing our best to prop up each other. I have regrets, too fuzzy to mention. Dave’s still in my address book. I will get around to erasing his contact details. Still, those eraser crumbs, past particles, will diminish me.

 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.

NONSENSE VERSE

The Evolution of a Spelling Bee 

Quips, witty rejoinders and repartee

Provide such fun and games for me

Chuckled the Thesaurus Bee delightedly

I’ve upgraded far beyond spelling

Because synonyms are so compelling

Different words can enhance a telling

But be careful when using a thesaurus

Your excessive verbiage may yet bore us

Only to render logic opaque or porous

The dictionary remains my favourite book

And I always love to source and look

Up a word’s etymological language nook

Jargon, “-ese” and lingo in the vernacular

Capitalized acronyms are quite spectacular

Globish, pidgin, patois: I’m not particular

There’s there, their and naturally, they’re

Tens of hundreds of homonyms to spare

You will never mix up “bare” and “bear”

I’ll buzz on about onomatopoeia

Maybe the next time I bumble by to see ya

Your garden variety lexicographic encyclopedia

Rhymes, they haven’t warranted a mention

You’ve surely gleaned my verse’s intention

To promote your vocabulary’s extension 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. My 2021 novella Of Course You Did is still available.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Election Reflections 

Well, here we are now: Save Us. Canada’s federal election day is Monday, 28 April. Less than two weeks to go. Churn and chaos in global affairs (“I’m Afraid of Americans”) have overshadowed domestic issues, subsequently turning this one into a two-party race. One of them has got to win. The result will likely be a majority mandate and something like a prairie burrowing owl, a rare bird in Canada these days.

Even though it’s getting harder to laugh, I was amused to learn that Wednesday’s French language leaders’ debate in Montreal was moved forward by a couple of hours so as not to compete with the Canadiens’ pivotal final game of the regular season. The NHL playoff derby is similar to a tourist compound in a politically unstable sun destination during hurricane season, pretty much all inclusive, but you still need at least 90 points (They won, they’re in).

As I read that item in the newspaper, I thought, “This is us.” I could not help but smile. But hockey, like “Queen on Moose”, maple syrup, the Group of Seven and a two-four of brown stubbies, is a Canadian cliché. A tired truth. “We’re not Americans” is the default Canadian identity. The reality in a big empty country with a housing crisis is deeper, more complicated. When I look south of the Medicine Line, I see the American Dream is alive and well and within the grasp of some individuals. I see too that many individuals will never ever get a fair shot at even attempting to achieve it. Individuals all.

The national dream in Canada was the construction of a transcontinental railroad (twinned a century later with a paved highway). The Canadian experience has been one of collectivity: “We can do this for the betterment of all.” Results and benefits have been spotty; the past and present then are akin to novelist William Gibson’s “unevenly distributed” future (imperfect in the sense of grammatical tense). So, we are contemplating the character of the man who will serve as our next prime minister. Our choice is between an erudite, highly educated and highly experienced policy wonk and an ideological demagogue who spits attack ad catch phrases. Alas, there is no “Northern Magi” on the slate, no philosopher-king, just as les Canadiens have failed to draft an anointed Quebecois saviour. I don’t know, maybe things are looking up all around. Maybe. All this endemic mediocrity has to end somewhere.

Mondays Ann and I collect our granddaughter from daycare and deliver her to playschool. The divine Ms Moore will turn five come October. Her Monday afternoon playschool is conducted in Spanish. I believe it’s important to learn a second language – if you can. I took Spanish in Secondary One. The introduction of a second Romantic Language was supposed to goose my passably brutal grasp of French. Things did not shake down well for me. Eh bien. Alors. When I visit Montreal these days I find myself thinking in French from time to time. Trouble is, my vocabulary consists of a few hundred words (Last summer I tried speaking French to the proprietor of a cheap café in Bruges, Belgium and he looked at me as if I’d just wandered off the grounds of an asylum). While our granddaughter isn’t fully bilingual, she knows that Nana will bring her snacks for the short drive. This Monday she announced from her car seat in the back of the HR-V that she’d dropped her empty treat bag and Nana or Papa would have to pick up after her. Now, I was not raised in a warm family; love but never awkward displays of it. My experiences with very young people have always been peripheral. I’m as cuddly as an exhibit in a reptile petting zoo. I said, “No. You will pick it up. What you just did is called littering and littering is wrong.” I was going to relate “Alice’s Restaurant” but that was probably too much too soon and, anyway, it’s just a tiresome novelty song now.

Litter dumping gets my back up. I pick up litter around The Crooked 9, up off the street, in the back alley. Sometimes I pack a trash bag, gardening gloves and a sharp stick into the river valley. Something useful to do. I keep informal statistics. The litter winner is always Tim Hortons. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are tied for second. It’s a crowded field after that – some of which is best left where it lays. Come election time, I apply a similarly strict data gathering metric to party lawn signs.

Candidates’ authorized lawn signs may strike you as quaint. Advertising from analogue times, much like unaddressed mail. But the key to any message is its frequency. Content defers to repetition. Repetition perpetuates perception. The word-of-mouth isn’t just gossip, the buzz is real! Best get on board, ride the prevailing winds like everybody else. I mean, Jesus as a shepherd and the rest of us as sheep has always pissed me off, but, hey, his public relations apostles were good at what they did (“We’re talking to you Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,” said Lazarus and the leper).

The primary identifier for political lawn signs is the party’s base colour. Our riding of Edmonton-Strathcona is pimpled with New Democratic Party orange. Liberal red is as alarming as a rash in an embarrassing place and so there aren’t any. Another factor in the lack of Liberal presence could be that the party’s usual loser is running this time in Edmonton-Centre where she has a ghost of a chance. Her stand-in is a Sisyphean fellow who is usually ritually slaughtered like a lamb in a rural riding south of the city.

On the drive back to The Crooked 9 after our Spanish playschool errand, Ann said, “Who are the black lawn signs for?” I said, “Black? I don’t know, the Pirate Party?” We detoured from our regular route so we could slow down and have a look. We found another black lawn sign. Upon closer examination it wasn’t really black, more New York Yankees navy blue, a deceptive colour depending upon the light or lack of it. We learned the identity of our riding’s Conservative candidate. I would add “Farm” to his name – make him a real berry-picking roadside attraction (I am childish: I like to finish those fortune cookie fortunes with “in bed” or insert “butt” or “ass” between an American football franchise’s city and nickname).

Contemporary Canadian Conservatives are acolytes of former prime minister Stephen Harper and his regressive right “Calgary School” gospel of shrill complaint. They cannot even be described as 90s neocons, let alone traditional Tories. But the unifying thread through the party’s various guises has always been Royal or Union Jack blue, that blue, however you describe it. When you’re driving past a lawn sign (or a billboard for that matter), you have a fraction of a second to comprehend and absorb what you’re looking at. During an election cycle the accurate reproduction of a party’s identifying colour, its shorthand, is utterly crucial.

Edmonton-Strathcona Conservative nominee Miles Berry probably doesn’t own a farm and so it’s unlikely he cultivates blackberries. Certainly not blueberries. Was any old drum of ink lying around the sign shop close enough (as in horseshoes and hand-grenades) for his pirate signs? Is he indifferent? Incompetent? He’s blown more than a few chances to leave an impression on undecided voters because his botched lawn signs display more as litter than message: thoughtless.

All of the candidates on your riding’s federal electoral ballot have sworn they would be honoured to represent you in the House of Commons. They have promised to fight for you. You will note that some promises made by your slate of candidates are beyond the legislative powers of Parliament and therefore subject to judicial review. You will note too that hot-button issues such as education, housing and healthcare don’t actually fall under Ottawa’s jurisdiction. Don’t be like Miles Berry; pay attention to details – they matter.

                             

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

L’Affaire Alberta 

One problem with the digital transmission of correspondence is that sometimes people who aren’t supposed to read it can. The current White House administration can attest to this. The cause is usually user error shared exponentially and which is very different from predicated active snooping like steaming opening envelopes. Funny what you come across on social media.

Recently I read through the registration form for the Alberta USA Movement, a “flash mob cookout” to be held on a ranch near Camrose, AB which is southeast of Edmonton, less than an hour’s speed limit drive. The e-mail document could be a fake, but given the state of Alberta these days, unlikely. Regulations specified that Canadian flags were verboten! US ones only! A minor quibble like that could prove irksome to unvaccinated Trucker Convoy veterans who co-opted the Canadian flag as a symbol of protest.

Camrose is one of those Alberta towns whose reason for existing is now a little distant, hazy. It is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, so it’s five years older than the province. It was a regional railway hub when regional railways existed. It’s all services now: education, health and retail for locals and surrounding ranches and farms. It’s main street, Main Street, has been designated historic, quaint and eclectic. There’s a refurbished art deco movie theatre, a hotel with a tavern, and a Chinese restaurant. There’s always a Chinese restaurant. Main Street began to wither in the 70s when developers erected a mall just outside of town on Highway 13. The mall began to wither when developers erected stand-alone big box retailers beside it and on the other side of 13. Camrose is The Last Picture Show, Winesburg, Ohio and Hal Ketchum’s despairingly catchy “Small Town Saturday Night”: ...you know the world must be flat, 'cause when people leave town they never come back...

Annexation by a convulsing superpower will fix everything. This mentality makes the separatism movement in Alberta very different from that of Quebec’s. Quebec’s separatists demand solitude. Alberta’s secessionists crave some sort of Christian Mingle hook up as comforting as a mom tending to a scrape with a Q-Tip dab of Mercurochrome, a Band-Aid and a kiss. The way things weren’t but could’ve been. In that other god they trust because the only way forward is backward, leveraging complaints and inflating grudges.

Meanwhile, the “Elbows Up!” federal election campaign is underway. It’s proving to be the most memorable one in my years as an eligible voter because the main issues supersede traditional internal bickering. The very nation is being threatened by a friend and ally. Trust has been broken. So much so that even Quebec is exhibiting signs of Canadian nationalism. It’s strictly a two-party race and I suspect the result will be a Conservative or Liberal majority government. Majority governments are rare birds of late. Black is white, up is down.

Closer to home, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith spent the weekend in Florida where she attended a Prager University Foundation gala. Prager, a sophisticated right wing propaganda operation, is as scholastic as Trump University. She also revealed to Breitbart News (Hello Steve Bannon! How was prison? A healthier stint than Jeffrey Epstein’s I’ll bet!) that a Canadian Conservative government would be more aligned with the views of the current White House administration (I since understand der Trumpenfuhrer is jury-rigging a mechanism for an unconstitutional third term). Her intended “Midas Touch” endorsement which might prove the “Kiss of Death” to the Conservative campaign. Reading the room in a closed United Conservative Party town hall meeting in a Camrose motel banquet facility is a little different from having a middle finger on the Canadian pulse. 

Premier Smith, advocate for and author of the “Alberta Sovereignty Act” and slave to her simplistic populist ideology (the “Calgary School” to political scientists), is destined to be remembered as either a heroic diplomat, think Chamberlain in Munich (that worked), or something akin to one of the more salacious footnotes in the Starr Report which went rather deep probing President Clinton’s daily dalliances with a smitten White House intern (Hi Monica!).

Now, the time has come for me to get my drag rags on and perform as a Spice Girl for Premier Smith: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want! I’m speculating now, but I think Premier Smith wished to attend that Camrose cookout. Tricky optics, though. I think the elephant in the Alberta government’s cabinet room is Republican. I think this province’s government has a covert agenda that’s as dirty as a coal mine or an abandoned oil well. I think it’s time for this government to come clean.                           

 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Indications of Spring 

This past Tuesday morning I spent too much time in the dentist’s chair. I visit frequently because 50 years of black coffee and 25-a-day doesn’t qualify as self-care in certain circles. There’s a flat-screen TV mounted to the ceiling. It’s a SHARP (“From sharp minds come SHARP products”). I’ve never asked for it to be turned on; so many years, so many visits. I play short-rack Scrabble with the brand: I begin with HARP and HARPS and go from there. Time passes. This time was different: I fumbled with the remote long enough to access the wasteland. I found the Chicago Cubs hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers in (“Crumbling guardrail, slow motion car fall!”) Tokyo. Baseball was officially underway. I settled back for a not unpleasant hour and a half.

“Been waiting all winter for the time to be right just to take you along, baby, get ready…” My unofficial spring anthem is “Fishin’ in the Dark” by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. If that three and a half minutes of euphemistic joy doesn’t make you want to square dance with hillbillies like Bugs Bunny, you’re either unconscious or dead (The Alarm’s “Rain in the Summertime” greets the June equinox). I played “Fishin’” five consecutive times Thursday morning, shoes off on the living room carpet for James Brown-Mick Jagger interpretive dancing. Worked up a sweat.

There wasn’t a whole lot of country music in my record collection when I moved from Montreal to Edmonton in 1990. What I had was outlaw. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash (Thanks, Dad!), a fine early days of CD compilation of Willie Nelson, Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett. I was aware of the Dirt Band of course because Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972) remains a legendary tribute to traditional country music (Their Dirt Does Dylan from 2002 is worth your time should that combination intrigue). The first “shaker” or hall party I attended was unsettling. A choreographed line dance to the Dirt Band’s cover of Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch” filled the floor. I was appalled. Then “Fishin’ in the Dark” came on.

Thursday afternoon I strutted down Whyte Avenue. For the most part, all things considered, I figured I was looking fine. My reflection didn’t crack any display windows. I was wearing my older bomber jacket, the one with the rotted collar and cuffs. Its brown leather has faded to green in some places. My scarf was tied just so, a Eurotrash knot. On my head a salt-stained and sun-bleached Boston Red Sox cap. My destination was Blackbyrd, my preferred indie record store. I overshot it, too distracted by the bright blue sky and the warmth of the sun. I doubled back. I spent almost an hour browsing, something I haven’t done for ages. I bought five discs; some jazz, some blues and a few records by groups whom I’ve heard about more than actually heard. I felt like Hemingway: “It was good.”

Saturday morning, just yesterday, I experienced once again the serendipitous mystic elation of scribbling. My usual cigarette Circle K is on University Avenue across from the dormitories and up the street from the Butterdome, an indoor athletic facility that really does resemble a pound of butter. The young woman who manages the store greeted me warmly. Here comes a regular. She was training a teenage boy. I guessed his first day on his first-ever job. We’ve all been there. I was patient; the day outside was looking to be a fine one, no hurry. I chose a Bic disposable with a Toronto Blue Jays logo on it while I waited. I’m out of Zippo fuel and these days that stuff is a dedicated errand commodity, hard to find.

Once they’d totalled up my cigarettes and applied the bulk discount, I said, “You haven’t charged me for the lighter.”

The Circle K lady replied, “I know. It is my gift to you.” I didn’t know what to say. What could I tell her?

My forthcoming novel Sunset Oasis Confidential opens with its hero attempting to buy a Bic in a Circle K. The scene was inspired by my own attempt to buy a Bic in this very store three years earlier. That particular episode reminded me of an uncompleted transaction with a cashier in a Montreal record store 45 years before. Combined, I now had the refreshed genesis of a niggling story: no middle, no end, but a new beginning after two false starts.

I strode out of my Circle K yesterday, a little pumped, a little primped peacock. The strip mall parking lot was Edmonton in springtime, patches of grey and black ice, dunes of non-skid grit and litter. I stepped over all the debris, not because I took long strides, but because I was defying gravity, walking on sunshine.                   

  

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Have a look at the jacket design at my companion site www.megeoff.com. Of Course You Did is still available. Collect the set!

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Springing Forward, Turning Back Time 

Ann swears daily that she won’t look at the news feeds on her device anymore. Friends and relations report cancellations of home newspaper delivery, news apps and cable news networks. An unrelenting assault of madness agitates. And there’s a secondary factor: consuming reasonably objective information to stay reasonably well-informed is not inexpensive. An ability to afford a ceaseless barrage of bad news is now something of a questionable privilege. We pay to be driven mental.

Ann and I are of our era. Although Ann is more comfortable with small blue screens than I will ever be, we like tactile facts and analysis, the texture of paper. The Crooked 9 receives The Globe and Mail six days a week and The Edmonton Journal on Saturdays (mainly for The New York Times crossword puzzles). We subscribe to The Economist, The Walrus (“a Canadian conversation”) and Alberta Views. The albatross of current affairs – whatever the reporter’s slant or pundit’s point of view – is that they’re current. Sometimes I ache for a different magazine lying around the house. Something new, something less dreadful to peruse.

I am a newspaper and periodical junkie. Not my fault.

The Montreal Gazette was dropped every morning in the house I grew up in. Dad always bought The Montreal Star at Central Station, something to read on the train home from work (Bastard did crossword puzzles in ink, my mother too). Time Canada arrived with Tuesday’s post. My big brother subscribed to Hockey Pictorial. After church he’d buy The Sunday Express, a tabloid whose existence was predicated on Saturday night’s Montreal Canadiens game. My first ever magazine subscription was a gift from my brother, Sports Illustrated with a string attached: he read it first. An American family from Lake Charles, LA lived across the street for a time. Three boys close in age, Doug, Alan and Walter. They devoured Circus magazine, my gateway drug to the music press.

I’ve been something of a moth in my life. I sought the firetraps everywhere I’ve lived or overstayed my visitor’s welcome, shops stocking magazines, newspapers and usually tobacco. Billy’s on Calgary’s downtown Seventh Avenue transit corridor. Mike’s News on Jasper, Edmonton’s main street; Hub Cigar across the river on south side Whyte Avenue. In Montreal there was a place on Cypress behind the Windsor Hotel whose space demanded sideways crab scuttling; I imagine it now as a hoarder’s wet dream. Multimags was street level in the Brutalist building atop the Guy Metro entrance.

Multimags was a constant in my life from 1975 through 1990, Polaris. I lived near it (four addresses), went to university near it and worked near it. It was always there until I left town. I’ve had a recurring dream of late in which I’m in Multimags, its witching hour version I guess because some of the fixtures are from Hub Cigar and Billy’s. I’m browsing for something in-depth about something insignificant. I’m desperate for distraction. I’ve got to get away from it all, flip through a magazine about nothing that matters. I want an issue of Sport, Inside Sports, Crawdaddy, Trouser Press, even a Hit Parader should Mick and Keith be on its cover. The racks are almost empty, no porn in sealed plastic bags even. All I can find are perfect-bind Life commemorative collectibles devoted to Taylor Swift and Jesus. A sleep apnea gasp startles me awake, sudden enough to shake off the night sweats.

Flints and fluid for my Zippo are not easy to buy. Magazines equally qualify as a niche market category. Those dusty, smelly, specialized shops, packed with character and arcana succumbed to the now, our disposable Bic era of simplistic social media misinformation memes. Fahrenheit 451 as ones and zeroes.

Ann and I are not cheap, but we’re thrifty. We frequent three different supermarkets, choosing our primary shop upon review of each banner’s electronic flyer. One store has become a significantly less painful errand experience since the retirement of a morbidly obese, overly curious and infuriatingly slow cashier (God bless you, Jacqueline). And the piped-in music is usually an unexpected treat: I’ve bopped around the store’s perimeter to Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, Better Than Ezra and Jesus Jones. We always turn up with a list if we’ve not forgotten it. I push the cart, Ann flits about. I look back sometimes and she’s Hall and Oates, gone. That’s when I head for the modest magazine rack. Simple Minds.

MOJO is a British music magazine. Its editorial content reflects my tastes – it’s stuck in the past. It’s also an investment, $18.99 CDN per issue. It’s also a key element of travel extravagance, I usually buy MOJO at an airport newsstand for something else to read should I choose to close my paperback. Our grocer, to my amazement, had MOJO in stock. And the Stones were on the cover as I always imagine them, a promo photo from 1969. The feature story was a deep dive into the recording of Let It Bleed (the sleeve art a leftover from its original Automatic Changer title), a masterpiece and a transitional album welcoming new member Mick Taylor. I was sorely tempted, but I was feeling sort of like Dr John, wrong place and wrong time: Ann and I weren’t going anywhere except maybe stopping for beer and cigarettes on the way home.

Athlon Sports 2025 Major League Baseball Preview caught my eye. It retailed for a dollar less than MOJO. I’d never heard of Athlon Sports. I was sure my friend Stats Guy had and I was sure he already had it. When he and I convene the Tuesday Night Beer Club (my American refugee neighbour, Ted, likes to join us when he can), we tend to revisit the past because any discussion of current affairs seems to act as a potion that turns us into two (or three) angry men. Baseball can be a touchy topic too because the game has changed (for the worse), the rules have changed (mixed reviews) and the money paid to its one-dimensional superstars is obscene (no debate), but we still love the idea of the sport, its essence.

I hadn’t purchased an MLB preview publication in decades. They went the way of the Montreal Expos, ceased to exist. Athlon Sports? The mastheads would be in a Hub Cigar-Multimags Hall of Fame: Baseball America, Baseball Digest, Lindy’s, Street and Smith …. Utterly essential reading although sometimes already stale at point of purchase. Rosters rock and roil. Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News were weeklies, authoritative, sports biblical, venerated. Their previews appeared closer to Opening Day which meant their team assessments incorporated newsy bits from spring training. I miss all these defunct newspapers and magazines; lately I miss paying a bit of attention to innocuous and meaningless stuff. Does anybody really care about the Miami Marlins? I dropped the baseball magazine in our shopping cart.           

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is with its publisher. Almost time to blow the dust off my companion site www.megeoff.com. Refresh coming soon.