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. 

A FAN’S NOTES

Ken Dryden 1947 - 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Bak 2 Skool in Albertie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Roadside Attraction 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Stuck In Transit 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitchcock never made a movie this suspenseful.        

                                      

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

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

NONSENSE VERSE

The Long View 

Bushnell :: Bushmills

Farsight :: Insight

Focused :: Unfocused

Crystal vision :: Double vision

Stare into the distance

The lens doesn’t matter

Stereo :: Mono

Landscape :: Hellscape

Exterior :: Interior

What’s that :: What’s next

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

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

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Date Night 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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