A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Pint of Faith to Get By

All you can think is: “The Romans were. They knew how to build roads. Straight ones. These streets must lead somewhere?”

To a Lindt chocolate shop. There are three in Old Vienna, the city’s historic First District. Possibly six. Poor suggestions for a pre-arranged rendezvous.

And you wander this ersatz grid painfully aware that other tourists have it figured and know the way to wherever they’re going. You end up on Stephansplatz, lost amid a gently stampeding crowd. Your wallet in front pocket, hand on, your purse is clutched to your tummy like a football. The staggeringly gorgeous and fussily ornate gothic cathedral, its craftsmanship divinely inspired, looms over cartoony Asian girls with pink pigtail hair and white miniskirts and go-go boots, shooting frames of selfies. Stephansdom is cosplay backdrop scrim, solid as it may be. Barefooted vagrants, slumped on the plaza’s cobbles, somnolent against walls, beg. There is a substantial dollop of human shit and one discarded sock in the lee of the church (also begging from visitors although “seeking donations” might be more dignified parlance as the clergy has a nicer house than all the homeless combined). The revolting pile is a tad too close to a street food vendor’s operation for some tastes.

You must turn away from it all. Look up in another direction. Marring the architecture of the Hapsburg dynasty are signs: HERMES, DIOR, LOUIS VUITTON. And signs of times, ROLEX and PATEK PHILIPPE: You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation. Fuck off. Everywhere, blissed out shoppers suffering from a birth defect – devoid of that crucial self-awareness gene – stop ABRUPTLY! anywhere to photograph the designer logo on their gusseted, rope-handled paper bags. Gauche and tacky social media and MasterCard credit to their shallowness. A swampy nadir.

You’ve got to shoulder your way away from it all. There’s not enough air. There’s not enough space. You hurry down a side street that may or may not lead you elsewhere. You encounter an armed Austrian soldier, warm in winter kit, forest camouflage, guarding what? A museum and Holocaust memorial on Judenplatz. You pause. The computations take a second. You think: “Still?” But you already know the answer: “Always.” And then you have your Vicktor Frankl moment: “Why?”

The Stephansdom spire is the wayfarer’s compass needle. But like a magician’s trick, it has disappeared from the ashen sky. Poof! Just like that. You’re desperate to return to your hotel for a break, to scour away your disgust and despair. You turn this way and that. After a few more wrong turns you find yourself lost yet again but standing outside an Irish pub. A perfectly adequate Plan B refuge. And you smile because a theorem has been proved: Anywhere you go in the rich world, there will be an Irish pub. Ipso facto slainte. Depend on it.

You’ve no idea who Molly Darcy is, was or if she even ever existed. But right now, she’s the woman of your dreams. She’s open for business. There’s a short stack of international editions of The New York Times, yesterday’s papers of peculiar dimension, but so what. There’s a New York Yankees banner on the wall and a New York Rangers pennant too. Curious. There’s no Smithwick’s on tap, but a pint of Kilkenny will do.

All you can think is: “It’s been a shitty morning, but the rest of the day, the rest of the holiday, need not be this way.” The music inside Molly Darcy is soothing. Strictly Memphis and Detroit, Stax/Volt and Motown-Tamla, not the usual Emerald Isle-themed Spotify list as much as you may appreciate Van Morrison. Marvin Gaye is singing “What’s Going On?” and you wonder if the whole wide world has maybe just been having a shitty morning of late. It’s coming on Christmas and the only minor miracle on offer is that it won’t fall on a Monday this year. Faint hope flickers.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential and Of Course You Did are still out there languishing in multiple formats. Nothing says "I love you" at Christmastime like a couple of skinny books by a woefully obscure Canadian author. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Michal and the Black Mercedes Van

Slovakia has yet to qualify for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. The Repre is looking ahead to two qualifiers scheduled for its home ground in late March 2026. I never imagined I’d expend a single neuron on the state of Slovak football. Then again, I never imagined I’d be standing in a shop in Bratislava’s historic Old Town advising my brother-in-law Al on the taste quotient of Repre jerseys and scarves. “The national crest shows off better against the white.” “Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. I like it.”

Edmonton Ann and I travel well with my sister Montreal Anne and Al. We get along without being in the others’ pockets. Ann and I tend to be laissez-faire while my sister prefers some semblance of structure, a partial schedule at least. Our participation is always optional. Ann and I never worry about disjointing noses nor even skinning them. Our quartet booked our trip to Vienna, Austria about a year ago. Once the details were finalized, Montreal Anne proposed a day trip to Salzburg. The four of us would split the cost of a private car, a private tour. Edmonton Ann and I agreed immediately. I thought, “No herding, no chatty strangers in close quarters; worth the cost.”

Well, I did not welcome Michal and the black Mercedes van outside the Hotel Karnterhof before dawn. I suffer from a self-diagnosed ailment: Irrational Bowel Syndrome. I mean, all of my lower plumbing functions, but I like a firm schedule and, my oh my, overseas night flights are terribly disruptive. Salzburg was distant, about three and a half hours away. As we climbed into the rear seats of the van Ann whispered to me, “We could drive to Jasper (from Edmonton).” That far. I was filled with something more than trepidation because despite three deliciously strong black Viennese coffees and a few cigarettes, my metabolic clock wasn’t meshing with our tour’s timing.

I’m a poor judge of age. I guessed Michal was as close to 60 as I am to 70, or thereabouts. A well-built fellow and very gracious – if a bit gregarious. The four of us learned about his ongoing divorce proceedings and his abrupt change of career. “Art therapy” was proving very helpful. He enjoyed ballroom dancing and photography was a passion, but most of all, he loved people and he loved to hear other people’s stories. And weren’t four Canadians just locked in his van? His mien was that of some ersatz encounter group leader whose area of expertise is “feelings” and inspirational platitudes and I thought, “Oh, God,” for a few reasons.

I generally enjoy hearing other people’s stories and I’m always careful not to draw out a windbag. What I truly enjoy is overhearing other people’s day-to-day private discussions in public places; good material. When my turn came to speak, I wasn’t particularly forthcoming. This fast drive through sleet and snow, and walled in by sound barriers on both sides of the highway – it felt like we were in a slick trench – did not constitute a therapy session. However, Michal did establish that I follow hockey. He said he was acquainted with Peter Stasny, a former Quebec Nordique (and later in his life, a respected Slovak parliamentarian). I said that I hated Peter and his brothers Marian and Anton because they were very good and didn’t play for Montreal. Michal said his current favourite player wears number 20 for les Canadiens: Juraj Slafkovsky (20 points and plus 2 in 32 games at this writing). I began to warm up to Michal.      

Salzburg is renowned for sound (and salt). The city, near the German border at the base of the Alps, is the birthplace of Mozart who, like Elvis, will forever be known by a single name. Red and blue shifts are not mere political gerrymandering in the United States: Christian Doppler, born across the street from Mozart’s home some fifty years after his death, described them as fundamental characteristics of sound waves. They come and go. You can hear it. What refuses to fade in Salzburg are songs about lonely goatherds and one problematic nun named Maria; the famous von Krapps.

Michal said that only North American tourists are enamored by the film location of what Canadian co-star Christopher Plummer derided as “The Sound of Mucous.” Michal said he’s tried to watch the movie but keeps falling asleep. I warmed up to him a little more. Mirabell Palace is that glimmering white edifice with the extensive gardens and fountain, fit for a singing and dancing brood of snotty brats. He insisted on taking pictures of our group there as we shivered in the rain. The joint is essentially an architectural attempt to reaffirm the Roman Catholic Church’s status in the wake of Martin Luther’s cataclysmic Reformation. The monk had some nerve lifting the veil on doctrine by translating the Bible into the vernacular. What struck me about the Archbishop of Salzburg’s palace was its grandeur and size. A lovely and elaborate space for an unnaturally large number of nieces and nephews.

Michal allowed us half an hour in Salzburg’s Altstadt. The city’s centre is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The cobbles were slippery to walk on. Tourist trap shop windows were eye level. Ann and I paused to grossly overpay for two mouthfuls of coffee. I ordered mine straight up. The woman serving us promised that mine would be as black as her soul. I laughed; she wasn’t kidding. High on a hill, above all the Baroque flourishes was a medieval fort. There was no time to get up to where I really wished to go. Salzburg is something like a monumental novel in a university literature course: either touched on in context to a lesser work by the same author or demanding an immersive semester of exclusive devotion.

As we drove out of Salzburg my thoughts turned to the water closet in our room at the Hotel Karntnerhof. Michal announced our next stop, a little detour up into the Alps, just another hour and a half. Destination Hallstatt, the most scenic place in all of Austria, Michal promised. I thought, “Oh, God.” He added that the local populace, numbering fewer than a thousand, hates tourists. I whispered to Ann, “Oh, Christ. This should be fun. Swell.”

The isolated village of stone and brick is grafted on to a sheer mountain face. Visitors must be able and fit. Ancient crooked stairs. The view from Hallstatt is picturesque: a placid alpine lake in a granite basin – although nothing out of the ordinary in a Canadian Rocky Mountain national park. Half the hook is the impractical, jerry-built quirkiness of the homes, churches and businesses. Hallstatt’s ailment is celluloid rapidly metastasizing into Instagram selfie idiocy. Hallstatt was used as a location for a popular Korean romance and inspired the backdrop of Frozen, an animated Disney film every young parent I know is utterly sick of. Our time in Hallstatt was short, but the place is awfully small and the weather was miserable.

Talkers talk. Expert ones ask questions. Michal learned our next planned excursion was to Bratislava. The Slovakian capital is on the Danube, about 50 kilometres west of Vienna. Bratislava was Michal’s hometown; he still lived there; his daughters and estranged wife resided in the United States – for now, things being what they are down there south of 49. Al’s mother was from Bratislava. Nellie emigrated to Canada in advance of the Russian “liberation” at the close of the Second World War. Nellie had a window and she went through it. Al still had relatives in Bratislava, first cousins he’d never met. The barrier wasn’t merely time and distance, but language too. Still, he wished to finally meet them.

Michal offered to be our driver, tourist guide, translator and facilitator. There were strings attached of course, cash preferred. And our own plans required modifications. I’d been looking forward to the train ride from Vienna to Bratislava. I love trains, but not in an unhealthy track gauge, locomotive number kind of away. They are metaphors, symbols, plot devices and compelling images in music, film and literature. While Michal, Montreal Anne and Al hammered out details inside the van in front of our hotel, I realized my steel wheel rides this trip would be confined to the subway. I was cool with that; subways are equally enticing. What was not cool was a too long a day of seatbelt confinement. I retrieved our room key from Edmonton Ann and hurriedly excused myself, teeth gritted politely, my colon as agitated as I was.

We left Vienna for Bratislava about an hour later than we did for Salzburg. The schedule wasn’t a perfect fit, but still something of a relief. Michal took the long way, secondary roads. The weather was clear. Very little traffic. I was content in the rear of the black Mercedes van. There was something new to see through every window. This was more like it. This was the only way to go.

My Oxford Atlas of the World is out of date. While it reflects the amiable breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993 in the wake of the parted Iron Curtain, neither nascent republic has yet to tighten up its respective nationalist monicker. I’ve always perceived Slovakia as more of a region of Eastern Europe than an actual country with a dominant race of people. Frankly, my old atlas and my morning newspaper are filled with information about too many places on the planet that rarely, if ever, cross my mind. Travel is, and should be, as illuminating as formal education.

Everyone on Earth shares its history, it’s just that some civilizations left more evidence and kept better records. All of what comes to light, often uncontextualized, can be messy. Human. From Bratislava Castle on a plateau above the Danube and overlooking the Old Town to an ultramodern “luxury” shopping mall complete with a “luxury” hotel, the city’s architecture is a dizzying kaleidoscope of varying styles. History writ in building styles and materials. There is medieval, there is Baroque, there is Soviet Brutalism. Romans, Mongols, Ottomans, Hungarians, Hapsburgs, Nazis, even Allied bomber crews, and Stalinists have all left their traces behind. It’s complicated.

Michal picked the restaurant and tended to the arrangements for Al’s lunch meeting with his relatives. Flagship Restaurant Bratislava. A beer-brewing medieval monastery long ago, heavy stone, heavy wood. Dark. Chilly. The massive space was converted into a cinema during the Communist era. The current occupants, restauranteurs who are very aware of university students (and their limited budgets), micro-brew beer on site. The vats are consecrated. Our group occupied a long table. Al sat at the head with his cousins and Michal. I don’t believe any nuances were lost in translation. I could see Michal concentrating intently. I warmed up to him again; he cared as much about Al’s experience as the rest of our group. They took a while up there. Edmonton Ann, Montreal Anne and I chatted down at the opposite end. The food was basic, cabbage, sausage and dough, very hearty, very tasty, reasonably priced and possibly unhealthy (the queue to be seated when we eventually left was two-wide and far too long for my patience had Michal not made prior arrangements). The beer was divine. And the toilets, an unnervingly frequent destination for me (aging is a fussy business), were a well-scrubbed blessing, homey. And, mercy me, the Hotel Karntnerhof wasn’t much more than an hour away.

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

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

The Hotel Karntnerhof

I had two confluent thoughts as I brought our taxied luggage inside. We had walked into a story by renowned American writer T.S. Garp. Or maybe my childhood chum Harry Lime had booked our room. Ann’s first thought upon viewing the reception area and the neighbouring lounge which also served as the breakfast room was Fawlty Towers, also a family owned and operated independent establishment. Fiction. Ann and I are usually on the same page even if we are unsure of its number.

The Karntnerhof is tucked away at the end of a lane or gasse in Old Vienna or Innere Stadt. The ring road around the city’s First District traces the fortifications of Vindobona, a Roman military camp erected on the bank of the Danube, an edge of the empire, sometime between 1 and 100 AD. Archeology is a long way down: the excavated ruins preserved for exhibit outdoors on Michaelerplatz are deep enough to demand a zoom lens.

Our quirky six-storey hotel was completed around 1880. The residential building became a brothel during the Second World War. The madame’s name was Rosa. It was transformed into a hotel sometime after the Germans pulled out; the Allies’ occupation of Vienna ended in 1955. The 44-room Karntnerhof is of its place and a very different time. The maximum capacity of the tiny lift is 225 kilograms, a close space for three people or two with luggage. The shaft, wrapped in a whitewashed iron grille, takes guests as high as the fifth floor. Our room was on the sixth, up a wide winding flight of stairs.

Travel lodging is secondary to the destination, but by no means an afterthought. Nobody wants to dread or barely tolerate the night after a full day out exploring a strange place. When Ann and I were at the Karntnerhof, we were unlikely to be in our room. For us, the hotel’s prime amenity was the fifth floor dachterrasse, an outdoor patio. It was enclosed on three sides by the hotel itself and two abutting buildings. The view through a grid of pigeon netting was white chimneys balancing at the apex of steep red rooftops, their tiles faded to a rusted brick colour. Towering over the tilted television antennas a little to our right were two green copper spires, their gilt accents shining as gold will. There was a silver cylindrical ashtray attached to the wall by the door. Attached to it by a sturdy cord was a paintbrush. The Karntnerhof expects its smoking guests to be tidy.

Sunrise and sunset in Vienna mirrored the timing Ann and I are used to in Edmonton in November and December despite the eight-hour difference. The late autumn temperatures in Vienna were chilly enough to require layers of clothing but not unpleasant. Because our room had no appliances, I cached my tins of Stiegl Goldbrau and Pilsner Urquell behind the flower pots on the dachterrasse. Isolated and above it all (“Up on the Roof”) and no bigger than an interior room it must be some kind of oasis come summertime. I considered it unser Zigarette und Biergarten. Apparently those two improper nouns require capitalization.

Jorge, the man whom I assumed to be the Karnterhof’s general manager was incredibly patient with me. I pestered him with questions. He explained that German is a grammatically complicated language and fluency is no easy feat. After Jorge listed the various forms of articles (way more than French), I replied, “The.” I asked Jorge about a curious character I had noticed on subway and tourist maps and on certain street signs. To me it suggested a curlier capital B or a stacked lower case a and b, rendered in some dainty font I was unfamiliar with. I knew strasse meant street, but from time to time it was rendered as straBe. He said the eszett represented an even sharper s-sound than pronounced in strasse and to try and imagine strassse. Not to be outdone, I countered with thorn, the defunct Anglo-Saxon character which closely resembles the capital Y on your QWERTY keyboard. Thorn’s sound is th as in "the" and so Ye is not ye if ye know what I mean. Ann and I asked Jorge about anything we were curious about: this or that restaurant for supper; public transit; the Art Advent am Karlsplatz Christkindlmarkt and the big daddy Christmas market at Schloss Schonbrunn, which boasted a skating rink and curling sheet.

One Karntnerhof curiosity I did not ask Jorge about was a painting in the hotel’s bibliothek. This was the room Ann and I passed through a few times per day en route to our semi-private cigarette garden. There was a desk with a computer on it, Windows, black (I found a few of my books for sale on Amazon Deutsch). Red hardbound volumes of Nietzsche on the shelves, coffee table books celebrating the arts and architecture of Wien, and, of course, airplane fiction left behind by fellow travellers: Mozart and mish-mash.

Works of art hang throughout Hotel Karntnerhof, in the halls, the rooms, the reception area and the lounge. Some are charcoal nudes. Many are studies of birds which I presumed dated from a time when scientists were known as natural philosophers. An oil painting by the dachterrasse door in the bibliothek stood out, captivated me. Mystified me. A scene from an art museum. Most of the art lovers wear military uniforms. Every arm of the Nazi war machine is represented and most of them are contemplating a large painting in an ornate frame. An inside story is more familiar to me as a literary device. The painting within the painting depicts a vanquished villain or wounded hero of myth. Christian or Classical, I could not say. Whatever happened to him was grievous. I read the date on the canvas as 1959. Ann read it as 1969. Consequently, the artist’s name remains as much a cipher as their subject.

I asked Jorge about the highs and lows of his trade. He said February could be a quiet month, but the Karntnerhof was usually always full otherwise. There were just too many people in Vienna, he said. A gentle lament for one of the hidden costs of a vibrant tourism industry. Naturally, Ann and I were not part of the problem. Strangely, despite the unaccommodating lift and the nineteenth century charm of the lounge, Ann and I rarely encountered the hotel’s other guests except at breakfast. These other people from other parts of the globe were most annoying, sometimes delaying our access to the coffeemaker and buffet for minutes at a time.

There is no place like home. Ann and I agree on that and most other things. As a trip winds down switches in our heads flip. We begin repacking a day in advance of our departure. We have missed our life at the Crooked 9. Our holiday is the blank squares on the kitchen wall calendar. I am always glad and somewhat relieved to revisit the chore done weeks before in Edmonton. Me and my clothes are worse for wear. I conduct myself like a spy when we travel: observe, explore, learn, blend in – we tend to bypass those racks of tourist brochures found in every hotel and avoid curated or orchestrated activities. Extraction is always welcome. Faces: I was glad to come and I’ll be so sad to go/But while I was here I had me a real good time. Ann and I have bedded down in every type of hospitality establishment ranging from no stars to five. Utilitarian requirements always. Until now. My memories of Vienna will always commence with the Hotel Karnterhof: I did not want to check out.

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

A FAN’S NOTES

I Am Shocked! Shocked, I Say!

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain – F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nick Carraway), The Great Gatsby

Modern-day Arnold Rothsteins (Meyer Wolfsheim in the novel) needn’t concoct such elaborate schemes. The Jazz Age has passed. There's a new flap about. 

Vices are fun. Their addictive nature demands strict management however. Therefore, it’s preferable not to have too many to juggle. For instance, drink and drugs may cloud your betting judgment. Card counters best not be seeing double. Have a cigarette and select an alternate. Know your limit.

Gambling’s never provided me a tenterhook rush. I’ve always viewed it as the opportunity cost of other vices. Sports and gambling used to have a taboo relationship, like incest or Rosemary’s Baby. Before you knew it, professional poker turned up on your TV’s sports channel. The creep became a sprint. Sports gambling has since been legitimized and digitized. There’s an app for that in-game prop bet.

A doughy and pasty Wayne Gretzky shills for one industry firm during hockey games broadcast in Canada. The gig probably pays better than his middle-aged men’s line of clothing in a failed department store chain. And probably better than the returns from his shuttered wine bar just past security in Edmonton’s international airport.

I was mildly stunned to see stadium advertising for betting whilst seated along the first base line at a late September Toronto Blue Jays game. This was after all the nostalgia infused apple pie sport still somewhat tarnished by the Black Sox and Pete Rose. More glaring mixed messages: beer and emulsified food (killers both and so addictive), but no peanuts because some pale, fragile child may have a reaction.

Have you been married more than once? Chances are, somebody’s going to tell you that one of them was a very bad idea. But you were thinking about mutual benefits at the time. Pro sports courted its first cousin. Well, gee. Well, genes. What could possibly go wrong? Betting scandals have erupted like volcanos in MLB and NBA of late. “Dropped like bombshells” in journalese. These are just the trailers: More scandals! More leagues! Coming soon to a theatre of the absurd near you. United States Attorneys will tut-tut and blather on about the inherent integrity of venerable institutions. Does corruption surprise anybody anymore? Really? Such a disgrace! Please.

The fix is implemented by sports books’ online in-game prop bets. Prop bets are micro-wagers, big money staked fleeting moments that the athletes themselves can manipulate and control. A basketball player may remove himself from a game upon playing a certain number of minutes and registering some other stat, rebounds maybe, assists. Somebody bet on those numbers. A pitcher ensures a slider is well out of the batter’s strike zone and below a certain velocity. Somebody bet on the umpire’s call and the pitch’s speed. Hell, gamblers could conceivably get to anthem singers now: “Your rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” will do America proud. You’re a diva, you tend to warble, but can we discuss the over-under?”

The motivation of the alleged complicit players vexes me. Greed is always the usual suspect, but these guys are paid well by any standard. Signed up union members at that. I think the reps (and even the shadowy influencers) would host a brief Burner Phone 101 seminar. Threat and duress? Favours for less fortunate friends? Stupidity? Maybe simple human nature is the key.

The Confessions is one of the world’s great theological texts. In any religion. Bit of a grind; I wouldn’t recommend it as beach reading should you be embarking on a discounted tourist compound holiday in a hurricane zone. No worries, there’s a cheat song for your earbuds and iPhone. Mick Jagger summed up The Confessions succinctly: Augustine knew temptation/He loved women, wine and song/And all the special pleasures/Of doing something wrong…

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

A FAN’S NOTES

Game Seven on the Radio

“This pitching change brought to you by Home Hardware.” Oh, my boy, there’s lots of pitching changes in modern baseball. “He’s thrown thirty-six pitches already; he’s got to be getting tired.” Where have you gone Bob Gibson? Home Hardware’s pitch is Canadian local ownership. Everything a pitcher needs to doctor a ball always in stock, I suppose: grease, files, sandpaper.

I’ve also memorized the telephone number of Pizza Nova even though I’m certain central Alberta is a titch beyond the Ontario chain’s delivery range.

Toronto Blue Jays, a beleaguered nation turned the spotlight up on you. Ann and I saw them hosting the Boston Red Sox in late September. One of those games that mattered. A road trip for us, a fun and memorable night at the ballpark. I can never be a hardcore Jays fan simply because they aren’t Montreal’s expired Expos. Had the Jays lost the American League Championship Series to the Seattle Mariners, I might’ve shrugged. This World Series wasn’t about cheering for the Jays. It was about cheering against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the big money and the Hollywood glitz.

My friend Stats Guy was mildly torn over the match up. He grew up in California. A lifelong Dodger fan now delivered from any loyalty dilemma by the demise of the National League Expos. International affairs have thrown him a curve. Relations between the United States and what is now Canada haven’t been this fraught since the War of 1812 and the Fenian Raids fifty years later. He was reluctantly leaning Jays. Something of a wincing blustery shout at U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra who has infinitely raised the volume of Ugly American deaf douchebaggery.

The 2025 World Series is now in the record book. The end came for the home team in the bottom of the eleventh inning. Down by a run with just one out. Jays on the corners (They’d loaded the bases with futility in the ninth). Infield grounder. Two outs turned. Series over. Stranded runners don’t haunt winners.

Saturday afternoon I said to Ann, “I’m interested in the final game.”

“Do you want to go out and watch it?”

“God, no.” A crowd of other people. I’m too tired of tribes. God, no.

I can’t remember how many years ago we cut our cable television. As much as I enjoy baseball, Montreal Canadiens hockey and Canadian football, I can’t say I’ve pined for their visual wastes of time. I check the results next morning. Our streaming access is lean too. There’s too much stuff out there unworthy of subscription. Still, this fall’s World Series commenced with a huge hook: Us and the US. And that hook became increasingly huger.

Ann and I drove a little south and a little east of Edmonton last Thursday morning. We were to stay overnight in the “Rose City”. The occasion was an informal wake staged at the Masonic Lodge. A high school friend of Ann’s had died. The scattered old gang would gather in “historic” downtown Camrose. My selfish hope was that the afternoon’s affair would bleed into a World Series game in the hotel bar. Alas, there’s never a convenient time to die. Thursday was an off day.

I said to Ann, “I’d like to listen to the game on the radio. I don’t know if that’s even possible.”

Ann replied, “You used to love listening to baseball on the radio.”

I did. Expos broadcasts were a conversation between announcer Dave Van Horne and colour man Duke Snider, he of The Boys of Summer and the third proper noun in the chorus of “Talkin’ Baseball” fame, California laconic. (A hardcover of his 1988 "autobiography" The Duke of Flatbush is still on my shelf.) Dave and Duke did not clog the air with maniacal recitations of statistics. Dave and Duke simply chatted. And like drop-in neighbours around a kitchen table, they were comfortable with silences even though dead air is a radio crime. The rhythms of baseball should naturally deflate windbags. Why analyze nothing? Much more mercifully, not every moment of action was brought to me by a paying sponsor.

Duke’s in game pitch was for Orange Maison, “The major league taste I really enjoy.” The stuff was sold refrigerated, its container a bulbous orange plastic bottle with a convenient slim neck. Designed to swig. Its two main ingredients were sodium benzoate and floor sweepings from the pulp and paper mills in Alma and Bromptonville which masqueraded as pulp. Orange Maison paired well with vodka.

When the opportunity presented itself, between innings or during a rain delay, Duke would tell Dave a story from his glory days as a Brooklyn Dodger. Me and my friends Glenn and Tim knew Duke wore just three pairs of spikes as a pro: his mudders, his gamers and a new pair that had to broken in. None of these plain black leather baseball shoes came with a paid sponsorship. And we’d riff on Duke’s other stories. “The Dodgers barnstormed through Japan one off-season. And Jackie, Pee Wee and I…” The three of us would add sake, geisha girls, You Only Live Twice rice paper walls, Fat Man and Little Boy. “The Dodgers used to hold spring training in Havana, Cuba. There was quite a fine hotel close by our grounds. One night, Jackie, Pee Wee and I…” And off the six of us would go; Glenn, Tim and me departing from Woody’s Pub barstools.

As a boy I experienced time zone bliss. A rainy night in Montreal and the Expos crackling over my bedroom radio from San Francisco, LA or San Diego. Dave and Duke talking about the weather, the brown haze in the sky or the cold wind off the bay. Central Daylight Savings was pretty good roadtripping too. Middle America, an hour's difference, Chicago and St. Louis, formerly the extent of the major league's reach. Ballparks and cities I hoped to visit someday.

Ann found the Sportsnet radio stream on her iPhone. She plugged her device into the socket beside the landline and above the kitchen counter for me. Then she disappeared. Ann knows her sports when she has to because she’s a good listener and the clichés and Cathal Kelly in The Globe and Mail often amuse her. Ann has her limits. I spent three or so hours alone in the Crooked 9’s kitchen. The miracle of puttering is that even the simplest task can be stretched out for however long I decide it takes. Our supper dishes eventually got done. I scribbled in my Hilroy copy book. I prepped Sunday morning’s coffee. I spot washed the floor. I smoked on our front porch between innings. Long before the Jays flamed out in the home half of the ninth, bases loaded, I sensed the ending. This was going to one of those games where the winning team doesn’t score more runs in one inning than their opponent through nine.

“Well, Ann, you talk about momentum. How is momentum a factor tonight?”

“Well, Geoff, it’s huge, just huge.”

“Does it get any bigger than this?”

“Well, Geoff, as I said, it’s huge. Just huge.”

I can’t recall the names of Sportsnet’s Jays radio broadcast team. I can tell you they weren’t Dave and Duke. Conversation to them is some kind of pre-Apple and -Android abstract. Less than six outs in their stilted patter, their spew of banal inanities, began to annoy the fuck out of me. Listening to the radio with the volume set on MUTE proved impossible.

Doing something the old way couldn’t take me back, couldn’t replicate something I can’t explain, what I was hoping to maybe feel. More disturbingly, I now have positive focus group thoughts about Home Hardware and Pizza Nova because I craved and welcomed their tiresome interruptions.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential has been available since June in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Collect the set! Buy Of Course You Did (2021) too.

NONSENSE VERSE

Feast of All Hallows

Did I just see a mouse in our house?

Grey hallucination, a shadow of doubt

A late onset form of acid reflux?

Teenage recreational drug redux

I killed a real rodent with a trap

Its big-eyed Disney spine went snap!

Silverfish and centipedes on the floor

I crush them all and stomp some more

Maggots fill me up with dread

Festering wounds or life in the dead

We once babysat a pet tarantula

With a thorax larger than my fibula

This Charlotte was no E. B. White

Hirsute creature, Halloween fright!

And what to make of you, my love?

I will require black rubber gloves

Your sleazy, casual perfidy

Has not been sitting well with me

Your treachery bungs my craw

Your sentence is hammer and saw

I shall cut you into hundreds of pieces

Then hand you out as bloody Reese’s

You’ll always be my dear “Buttercup”

Which is why I must slice you up

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential (2025) is languishing out there in multiple formats. Go against the flow and visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did (2021) still gathers dust in the marketplace. Collect the set!

A FAN’S NOTES

Hey! Ho! Rock ‘n’ Roll!

Little text and even less insight, but lots of pictures. The grocery store magazine rack 40-year history of rock ‘n’ roll gorgeously laid out in Life magazine’s December 1, 1992 issue ($3.95). The editors credited the birth of this as yet nameless jumpy hybrid of blues, country and electricity to a 1952 Cleveland teen-centric and radio-sponsored public event, the Moondog Coronation Ball.

In the spirit of pinpointing exactly what can never be exactly pinpointed, it follows that the Holy Trinity of this once uniquely American genre in the Life universe is Elvis, Dylan and Springsteen. These men do not crack camera lenses. The somewhat surprising successes of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man, biopics of extravagant Brits, prompted Hollywood to zoom in on a trio of earthier local heroes.

Elvis traced the King’s career arc from discovery to the tragedy of unrealized salvation. Presley was ultimately trying to recapture the magic of Sun Studio again, those unforgettable sounds recorded at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. You want to believe this speculative truth even though your back begins ache, as it will, on a long-haul economy flight about 130 minutes in. A Complete Unknown is a slice of His Bobness. New York City to Newport, Woody Guthrie to Les Paul, a vapour trail of precious folk scene pretensions shredded in his wake. Headed for Sun, in his way.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a sliver. Nebraska is that dark space between The River and Born in the USA. A spare and haunting album with echoes of that room on Union Avenue. The phrase “deliver me from nowhere” is sung twice on the record, in “State Trooper” and “Open All Night” – a stream of consciousness song which presages “Radio Nowhere” from Magic. The title track and opening lyric, I saw her standing on her front lawn/Just a-twirlin’ her baton evokes Mary on her front porch in “Thunder Road”. In this instance though, the outcome, the promise, is a headlong drive into the American Nightmare.

The film opens with the finale of “Born to Run”, the last song of the last encore on the last date of a tour. “Hungry Heart” is all over the radio, Top Ten. We know what’s happened, we know where he’s been. The context of Nebraska is further clarified by a full E Street Band studio run-through of “Born in the USA”. We know what’s coming next and CBS is intent on riding that rocket.

Nebraska (number 226 on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums originally published in 2012 and since boosted to 150 in the 2020 revisionist update) was a Z-28 skid into left field and viewed by the corporate skyscraper powers that be in 1982 as commercial suicide. If you’re intent on ending something, best be sensible and choose career over life. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is not a raucous feel-good flick. It runs like a two-hour public service announcement detailing the crippling toll of clinical depression. But it rocks better than any official disease marketing awareness campaign.

People are wired differently. Brain chemistry is a factor. Emotional triggers and experience are something else. Why “Independence Day” from The River was not used in the film is a mystery, but there’s the source pretty much laid bare: Well, Papa, go to bed now, it’s getting late/Nothing we can do is gonna change anything now…

The near-tragedy depicted is not without humour. At one point a CBS executive says of Nebraska (paraphrasing): “It sounds like outtakes. Bruce would never release outtakes.” Snort! There’s an entire (and expensive) parallel career out there in record store land. The fun with films like Elvis, A Complete Unknown and this one is spotting the homage. You know a shot will be set up and framed just like an album cover or an overly familiar image from the music press. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere delivers.      

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. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Save Now! Pay Later!

Fifty-one thousand members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (and it better know how to employ a plural apostrophe) walked off the job October 6. The action directly impacted 2500 schools (public, separate and francophone) across the province. The 700,000 students affected range from kindergarten level to grade 12. These kids will play truant until Halloween at the least. Alberta’s United Conservative government intends to pass back-to-work legislation October 27. Five million people live in Alberta.

Strikes (and lockouts) are always the result of frustration, months of fruitless negotiation. The issues no longer up for discussion won’t come as a shock to anyone who pays a modicum of attention to the provincial education system. The ATA’s litany of complaint is D, “all of the above” on a multiple-choice exam. Classrooms are overcrowded. The hard cap headcount is ever-rising as teachers’ resources and secondary supports diminish proportionally. There are money matters too. Nobody has ever held a job without hidden duties, mystery tasks unhighlighted by bullet points in its official description. Implicit in any labour contract is that unpaid work should amount to a mere fraction of salaried requirements. Should Alberta’s teachers be paying for their students’ school supplies from their own underfunded pockets?

The UCP excels at conjuring issues outside of its jurisdiction and then offering solutions as veiled threats to other levels of government. But extortion’s not an option on its own mismanaged turf. The big news of late is the government’s launch of a sort of sports bracket in which Albertans can pick their favourites from an array of new license plate designs. Participatory democracy with no petition required! Meanwhile, the health file languishes despite being overseen by four (FOUR!) ministers. As for the education ministry…

The fuse for this fiasco was sparked last summer when the education ministry issued a diktat listing 200 books it deemed unsuitable for tender, social media-addicted eyes. Margaret Atwood and Aldous Huxley, authors I read for courses when I was in high school, made the Fahrenheit 451 cut. What really set the ATA afire though was the supplementary demand that all teachers list the books at hand in their classrooms for official vetting. Documenting out-of-pocket supplies and resources in July sounds an awful lot like an unpaid make-work exercise. 

Strikes always come with ripples, whether direct or indirect. Canada Post is in the midst of yet another labour disruption. A few chronic magazine subscribers aside, nobody’s noticed. Or they didn’t in Edmonton and Calgary until the October 20 civic elections. No eligible voter intent on exercising their democratic privilege had an Edmonton Elections or Elections Calgary registration card. They were impossible to get because they were impossible to distribute. The lines in school gyms were long and snaky. Reams of paperwork for voters to fill out and who were never taught cursive. To be fair to the grossly mismanaged Crown taxpayer-funded sinkhole, delays were exacerbated by the UCP’s ministry of municipal affairs needless MAGA tinkering with the simple mechanics of an unbroken system. Alberta in all her embarrassing majesty.

The greatest resource of any society is its youth. Educated people are smarter than morons; for the most part, all things considered, that’s a logical sweeping generalization. Nothing else to infer here. There are students looking toward provincial exams (necessarily optional now), graduation and university admission. Their education path zigged and zagged during the pandemic. This additional weeks-long gap (and counting) is not insignificant.

Covid fostered the myth of remote work as an employee’s right. An imaginary labour code clause which most workers are unable to exercise. Younger students at loose ends require supervision. Across every sector of the economy, from doctors to retail clerks, people are staying away from their jobs. They’re at home trying to remember the rules of grammar and work out fractions the other three-eighths of the time.

The government of Alberta spends $5-million per annum supporting charter schools. Private institutions outside of the public system. They should fund themselves given their exorbitant fees. One example is Waldorf School where female teachers are obligated to wear modest clothing underneath a concealing apron. Apparently, graduates, or maybe just the valedictorians, could possibly possess the ability to walk through walls because everything is made of atoms. There’s a hockey-focused academy in town, but the rest are mostly Christian of that peculiar evangelical MAGA variety.

A percentage of the students affected by the impasse will be eligible voters in the next provincial election which is scheduled for 2027. Though public memory is notoriously short, perhaps the brighter ones have been taking notes during their downtime.

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

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.