HUMAN WRECKAGE

Indications of Spring 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Springing Forward, Turning Back Time 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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