EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Mean Streets

Our American refugee neighbour Ted flew his family south of 49 for the Christmas holidays, however reluctantly. We look after one another’s properties. We are good friends. Ted has joined Stats Guy and me in the Tuesday Night Beer Club. It snowed on Christmas Eve. Heavily. I shovelled two properties, back and front and in between, and the stretch of public sidewalk linking our addresses, an explicit civic obligation. The snow came again on Boxing Day and kept falling for the next thirty-six hours. That amount is problematic to shift, disperse. Snowfalls like that never fail to remind me of Wallace Stegner’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose (1971). Should you be curious about life out west on both sides of the Medicine Line, read Stegner (I especially recommend Wolf Willow). Ted’s wife texted Ann: “We’ve been checking the weather in Edmonton. Has Geoff run out of swear words yet?”

Fuck, no, never. I can curse in both of Canada’s official languages. And I welcome the exercise, but maybe not the endless reps.

“Edmonton House,” a fur trading post, was established on the flats of the North Saskatchewan River in 1795. Winter came that year, just as it had for thousands of years prior to the colonial commercial initiative. And it kept coming. Winter came when Edmonton was incorporated as a city in 1904. When the province of Alberta was carved out of Prince Rupert’s Land and Edmonton designated its capital in 1905, winter came anyway. Winter has come ever since. It’s as reliable as sunset and sunrise, and full moons. And, curiously, it snows in wintertime.

Edmonton is a young city, even by Canadian standards. It came of age holding hands with the combustion engine. The automobile suggested Edmonton grow out instead of up because there’s a whole heck of a lot of space on the northern prairie. Its populace, now in excess of 1.1-million souls resides on some fantastically botched experimental alien ant farm – a big, very big, spread. Drivers need roads. Lots of them. And roads need to be like car tires in much warmer climes – all season, passable.

Collisions are inevitable. City council, often inert, sometimes inept and frequently nonsensically pro-active, works to rectify a century’s legacy of short-sighted and misguided urban planning. The addition of bike lanes and loosening of zoning and development regulations to encourage population density are inherently good things, attempts to undo unintended consequences dating from a different era. Contemporary retro-fitting and jury-rigging unzip their own duffle bags of gremlins. Bike lanes further constrain already congested arteries. Multifamily dwellings mean multiples of cars in neighbourhoods never designed to accommodate them.

And then it snows like a bastard. As it often will in Canada’s largest northernmost city. The snow abated 27 December, 2025. New Year’s Day brought freezing rain, icing on the cake. Saturday’s 17 January, 2026 Edmonton Journal front page headline: PLOW CREWS FACE THREATS. Verbal abuse of course and shovels as weapons. Alert readers will note the gap of 10 days between accumulation and clearing. Taxes imply a transaction; payers have a right to expect something in exchange for an arbitrary income skim. Efficient services, for instance. While local politics may be a springboard for those with greater ambitions, managing a city is an unglamorous grind. Banning plastic bags except for dog shit in dandelion dog parks is all very well, sort of a bullet point added to an incoherent mission statement affixed to the inaugural charter, but symbolic grandstanding doesn’t make snow evaporate.

Every Edmontonian knew the all-weather fat tire bicycle boys would be looked after first. Bike lane grooming requires a tiny, tank-tracked Bobcat only, not a giant Volvo grader. Those yellow machines, however late to the game, need space to do their jobs – hence parking bans (with generous notice). The gist of the Journal’s story was the breakdown of a tacit social contract. Citizens, already irate with the City’s service lag, were infuriated by its request for their cooperation to speed the tardy clean up. “Move your car, somewhere else, please.” “Fuck you.” Of course, in days like these, manners and civility are rare commodities. “Can we at least agree to talk about winter weather?” “Fuck you.”

The surface of the North Saskatchewan is always an intimidating and fearsome sight to behold once the spring melt commences. Its thick ice crust heaves into snaggled, jagged shards. Sometimes they’re as cloudy as an antique mirror. Sometimes they’re a shade of wedding dress white. Sometimes they’re grey and sometimes their sun dappled spectrum ranges from powder blue to royal purple. Ann and I never expected a view like this outside our front window.

Our street was graded Sunday, 18 January, 11 days after the storm. The snow on the road was alive during this period; it evolved. At first the ruts were like slot car tracks, the mound between them neatly scraped true by undercarriages. Wheeling in or out of them at the end of our driveway was a slippery and sliding hard turn requiring an unsafe rate of acceleration. Workaday traffic eventually compacted the snow into a slick highway. The sidewalks might as well have been ditches. The grader peeled the packed ice from the road as if it was citrus rind, right down to the asphalt. I admired the operator’s precision. I wondered too if operating heavy machinery while wearing earbuds might constitute some form of impairment before deciding the union man was everyman, just hearing what he wants to hear.

Windrows, those manmade banks of snow on the road and against the curb, are officially frowned upon in Edmonton because they narrow the width of a street and inhibit parking. Homeowners are exhorted to heave the snow from public sidewalks onto their front lawns instead of pushing it into the gutter. Springing ahead, the volume of meltwater is always a concern: better to top up the groundwater than overwhelm the sewer system.

The grader operator (sounds like a misheard lyric from Nick Lowe’s “Switchboard Susan”) left the Platonic ideal of windrows in his wake, left and right. Our street is now a one-and-a-half way and pedestrians sidle sideways like crabs – fitting in my case – the crabby part. He did his best at the foot of our driveway; I cleared the remaining chunks of ice by hand because our scooped snow shovel was inadequate for either pushing or cradling and heaving. I enjoyed the exercise.

A renowned winter city’s excuse for its inability to provide essential services was a tired cliché, the “perfect storm.” A perfect storm is the same thing as one of those “100-year events” that seem to occur on a weekly basis here, there and everywhere. I have it on good authority that Alvin Toffler, Faith Popcorn and Nicholas Negroponte were never once employed by the City of Edmonton. But you shouldn’t need a futurist to instruct the municipal council and the bureaucracy it oversees to plan ahead. With a little foresight, what cannot be prevented can at least be mitigated. Edmonton has no plans to collect or dispose of the shark’s teeth windrows. They, like January, the advent of a new year – all 41 days of it – are destined to overstay their welcome. 

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! "Alaska Highwayman" a song I co-wrote with the Muster Point Project is now on YouTube and available on Spotify and all those other streaming services.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Airports

A soul in tension that’s learning to fly/Condition grounded, but determined to try/Can’t keep my eyes from the circling skies/Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I – Pink Floyd, “Learning to Fly”

Broaching bureaucratic bafflegab with puffed-up, pimply little popinjays with fancy epaulettes on their uniforms or with similar, sterner authoritarian figures whose first language isn’t English is beyond futile; pointless semantics, even though liquids and gels are very different from pastes, lotions and ointments. Just bag it in order to move forward with ongoing clarity.

Flying ignites my inherent misanthropy. I won’t inflame that statement with any snotty remarks about body mass, armrests and manners. No, this is about raising cabin pressure, pushing the envelope of perceived entitlement with a Tetris stack of carry-on worthy of an employed bearer. How did it all get beyond the gate and the jetway, let alone past security (not to be confused with a Peter Gabriel album)?

Canada’s airport security agency is known by the acronym CATSA. I think of it as CATSASS. TSA is the American one and that sounds like a Canadian income tax form, one of those slips you’re missing when you file. The European Union’s open borders Schengen Area is an entirely different kettle of monkeys. Time is your enemy should you be travelling with a Canadian passport and intent on making a tight connection through Brussels: a stifling bureaucracy exists outside of its dimension. Proud to say I’d never been fingerprinted before. Thank you, Osama bin Laden, your legacy endures.

Airport security screenings are different the world over. In Canada they’re like a legacy family recipe no ever thought to write down. Federal regulations somehow receive an interpretive twist between provinces, cities and airports; regional attitude and size are factors. What amuses me is the inconsistent application of stern standards at the same airport on a different day.

Unheeded warnings, I thought I’d thought of everything…

My personal carry-on tote is a blue nylon knapsack that fits beneath the seat in front of mine. It always contains a pouch of wet wipes because airplane cabins rate with public toilets for cleanliness. A sandwich baggie of Kleenex pairs nicely with the wipes because there’s some sort of unnatural relationship between canned air and the viscous fluid sloshing around in my head. There’s a book, always a book, but never a hardcover, they weigh too much. The other standard item is a miniature iPad. Its operating system is MS-DOS. The only application that still functions is Boy Howdy Solitaire (the “hard” levels of Forty Thieves and Spider are going to be the death of me). This electronic item once required its own grey tub at a security checkpoint. These days it’s ignored; it might as well be a brass telegraph key. Or it was until I turned up at Flughafen Wien to board an Austrian Airlines flight to Brussels.

The woman who unpacked my knapsack at security was tall. I wasn’t surprised, everybody on the streets of Vienna was taller than me. She was very attractive and her grey uniform added a certain je ne sais Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS quoi. She was an archeologist, examining my iPad mini like the relic it is. I tried to explain: “In Canada, nobody cares about…” And for once my faulty oral filter was tripped, mouth flange, because I didn’t ask her if, perhaps, I deserved some punishment? I wasn’t dying for it, more like wishing and hoping. Besides, she was okay with my ankle boots.

Trips are about arrival and departure and the generally happy space in between. Winter travel skews more fraught, you need proper footwear to walk the unguided walk. I favour shoes by Clarks. And I think the coolest shoes ever created are desert boots. I have three pairs. My red suede ones are just beyond. I have a winter pair too, rough brown leather, well-oiled and lined in a houndstooth pattern. “Tundra” boots, I guess. They passed muster in Vienna; I didn’t have to undo the red double-knotted laces to remove them. Canada was another story: CATSASS consternation.

Edmonton International Airport (YEG) is a long way from many places. No hub. Ann and I decided to segment our journey to Vienna. We spent a couple of nights in Montreal with my sister and her husband before the four us carried on to the Continent. For our return trip I booked a night’s stay for us at Montreal’s in-terminal hotel, a Marriot (I still think of YUL as “Dorval” and not Trudeau). We did this for the benefit of our backs and knees and because we’ve learned that we both might become a little tetchy when the hours between cigarettes reach double digits. (Aside: I’m convinced air rage incidents would be halved if smokers could conveniently light up inside airports. I mean, emotional support ratdogs and their dangerously fragile shepherds are granted better facilities, piss pads, Astroturf and rubber rooms. Fuck me.)

There’s no sensation to compare to this…

My Clarks tundra boots were an issue departing Edmonton. I was ordered to remove them, but at least the floor was dry. Nobody remarked on my boots in Montreal en route to Europe. That indifference, that hunky doriness, that sensible laissez-faire attitude proved to be a pop-up, gatecrasher oversight or a CATSASS rookie mistake. Flying home from Montreal to Edmonton my winter boots in a winter country at winter’s onset were suspect this time. I took my boots off. They’d be maybe four or five grey tubs behind the knapsack carrying my pathetic iPad mini. And my belt. I couldn’t hang myself then and there. At least the floor was dry.

"Ooh, they were never as good after Syd flipped out." "They're a non-entity sans Roger." A bit Floyd formulaic perhaps, but still worthy of headphones and hashish.

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 in print. Collect the set!

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Viennese Victuals

Fretting the exchange rate of a Canadian dollar against the euro is a pointless exercise. Especially for math-challenged people like me. While cash is kaiser in Vienna, baby, Ann figured out that for any electronic transaction we were better off deferring the conversion rate to our Canadian bank or credit card provider rather than obeying the instant skimming prompts of an Austrian ATM or handheld device. My sister Anne’s philosophy was much simpler for me to grasp: “A euro equals a dollar. It is what it is.” Her attitude led to my heartbreak. Bushmills Irish whiskey was on sale in every grocery store we ventured into, less than twenty euros. Trouble was our stay in Vienna was nine or ten nights and it takes me nine or ten months to work my way through a 750 mL bottle.

Leisure travel is paradoxical. You splurge for the trip well aware you will splurge on the trip and yet you try to economize. Once Ann and I settle in to our accommodation, we source the location of the nearest grocery store (and newspaper and tobacco shop). Our go-to was a SPAR Gourmet on Fleischmarkt; so proximate to our hotel there wasn’t time enough for me to enjoy an entire cigarette between doors.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company paid for my university education. The last ad agency I worked for specialized in everyday retail. “Busy mom (who’s active, fit and cares deeply about her family) is the gatekeeper” in the jargon of a boardroom brief. I’m always curious in foreign grocery stores, their shelf alignment and the brands – some local, some intriguing and some distressingly familiar. I was surprised to find Driscoll raspberries in SPAR, their provenance Morocco rather than Mexico. Made sense. A daily stroll to a grocer is very civilized, you buy what you need and leave the rest. Of course, hotel rooms aren’t living quarters, merely comfort havens.

Social media is something of a scourge. One of its mixed blessings is the “absolute must” designation on some travel site or toddler attention span app. Edmonton Ann and I and our brother-in-law Al and Montreal Anne refuse to queue with digitized sheep. And the four of us were mystified by the prevalence of Starbucks cafes in Vienna, a city renowned for its coffee. Was it American corporate hubris or idiocy? We found a proper refuge that suited us.

The only acknowledgment of modernity in the Café Hawelka are dates, but you have to know where to look. Some of the theatre posters on the wall by the foyer are relatively recent. The other visible dates warmed my heart. The mastheads of some of the world’s most famous dailies draped majestically from a rack of slotted wooden library poles. World news on a stick as long as a pool cue. Like the curtain discreetly concealing the water closets, the Café Hawelka is draped in atmosphere. The establishment opened for business in 1939, the year following the Nazi-engineered Anschluss. Whether you request a demi-tasse of high-octane coffee, a bottle of pilsner, a plate of strudel or a bowl of goulash, the formally attired waiter presents your order on a silver tray slightly larger than the dimensions of a hardcover book. All that’s missing is a low hanging cloud of blue tobacco smoke. You long to be part of a bygone intelligentsia and earnestly discuss philosophy, politics and psychoanalysis; sausages, waltzes and whiskers on kittens. Some topics will drive you to drink.

Ann and I patronized Loo’s American Bar (cash only) twice; we’d stumbled across a local watering hole. Both times we sat outside on a narrow rectangular terrasse. The awning was black canvas, the suspended electric heaters were white, their filaments orange. The faux fur rugs draped over our black stools were grey. The ashtrays were silver. The pilsner was gold. The soda citron was clear. The regulars, about seven of them, granted us suspicious sideways glances the first time. A few of them made eye contact on our second visit. My penchant to listen in on other peoples’ conversations was stymied by the language barrier. What were they talking about? They watched the street and their conversation struck me as running commentary. Had our time permitted a third respite at Loo’s, I like to think Ann and I would’ve warranted curt nods of vague recognition. Maybe as far as tourists went, we weren’t so bad. I almost literally bumped into one of the regulars in the tiny, geometrically awkward space outside the water closets and he was visibly stunned when I gave way, made myself small against the wall. He said, “You are so mannered.”

Old Vienna is quaint in an imperialistic way, an architecturally stunning reminder that empires and the dynastic families who created them inevitably must fall. Proximate to Stephansdom is a fine example of latter day quaint. Steffl is an actual department store. Given the area, it’s necessarily a purveyor of “luxury lifestyle” – whatever that may mean to shallow, aspirational acquisitors. A social media photo op? Anyway…. the top storey, the seventh floor, hosts Sky bar, famed for its cocktails. It promises a panoramic view of the city’s First District provided its expansive terrasse is open in late November and it’s not dark out. Very swish.

Edmonton Ann and Montreal Anne ordered Cosmopolitans. Al ordered a Vieux Carre. I, not seeing a Corpse Reviver No. 2 on the menu, followed his lead. Al is a master toxicologist, an autodidactic bartender. He’s got the books, the utensils, the vessels, the glasses and all those other obscure and essential ingredients in his kitchen bar. “Pale Hecate” has patiently summoned some wondrous improvised concoctions in ours too. A Vieux Carre is essentially whiskey, brandy and vermouth further flavoured by an array of accents, stuff Ann and I don’t stock in our fridge or pantry. Al pronounced Sky’s Vieux Carre the best he’s ever had; they’re in his repertoire and he’s savoured them in their birth city of New Orleans. Cocktail tumblers aren’t bottomless. You begin by sipping a Vieux Carre before allowing it to evolve into a great a novel, you slow down because you don’t want it to end. Then again, I’m the type of fellow who rereads his favourite books.

Austrian food is dense, deliciously so. So much so that you’re inclined to sit with it afterward. When our quartet went out for supper, we’d turn up somewhere shortly after six without a reservation. Restaurant margins are slim and the key to profitability is turnover. Viennese waiters possess extrasensory perception. Our meals arrived before we’d time to close our menus. Our waiters had already moved onto seating and serving the next party who’d yet to arrive. If you’re ever in Vienna and planning to break some heavy news over dinner and expecting earnest, lengthy discussion, don’t.

Twelve Apostles was the most memorable restaurant. It wasn’t the food although, like every other place, its specialties fell within “good” to “very good” parameters. No, it was the setting. A deep subterranean network of brick-vaulted chambers whose primary foundations likely date from Roman times. Medieval mortar. And a fine mid-twentieth century air raid shelter. The four of us wished to linger. Our waiter grudgingly acquiesced to a second bottle of wine and a second beer for me. We were on his clock.

Should your palate be a tad more sophisticated than mine, you will sneer, but I’m no schoolboy and I know what I like. There is a hot dog stand on Schwedenplatz, a transit hub, at the foot of a bridge over the Donaukanal. It was there I ate a fiery red bratwurst rammed into a reamed-out baguette. A neat and elegant delivery system. The condiments were Dijon mustard and curry ketchup. Ketchup on a hot dog is normally a felony, a capital crime. But on this damp, chilly evening by the water, the mildness of the curry combined with the spicy heat of the sausage and the tang of the mustard strived for the sublime. Had my timing been better, by forty years, say, I would’ve inhaled two of them.

Holidays in their way, as memorable as they are, are reliable sources of regret. I don’t mean inflated credit card statements; I mean things left undone. It’s New Year’s Day in Edmonton, the snow is falling down as is the temperature, and I’m thinking about that kebab stand beside the hot dog stand. I never did get there.                                                                                              

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 in print. Collect the set!

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Pint of Faith to Get By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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