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.