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.