SAINTS PRESERVE US

Keep Calm and Ostrich On 

Personal trauma? Bury it. A troublesome corpse? Bury it. Evidence of corporate malfeasance? Bury it. Scandalous allegations of ineptitude, corruption, sex and graft? Bury them. Commissioned studies that don’t arrive at a desired conclusion? Bury them. Mountains of refuse? Bury them. Used radioactive metals? Bury them. Carbon emissions? Bury them.

We bury everything, including history. And just when I figured there was nothing left to bury excepting a few old grudges of mine, Alberta strong and free in all her majesty and an outlier on Canada’s political scene, is seriously contemplating burying water. But not just any kind of water.

Many commodities are buried too, they must be mined, quarried or dredged. Consider sand beyond Vaseline, beach volleyball and a sunny holiday. It’s the bed under a properly paved road. It’s in glass and concrete. It’s the abrasive in fracking fluid – which is mainly composed of water. Sand in some form is as omnipresent as water in your life. The manufacturer of your shampoo likely lists its main ingredient as aqua. When Nestle sells 500 mL of your own tap water back to you, it used way more water than that to produce its convenient plastic container. Clean water, like sand, is a highly valued industrial commodity.

Alberta is Confederation’s angry mini-petro state, a province with republican fantasies. The source of its mismanaged resource wealth and its tired boom or bust economic cycle is the tar sands, gooey fossil fuel deposits up north around Fort McMurray. Extracting heavy bitumen and gussying it up for further downstream refinement requires a lot of fresh water. When I wash the sand-based crockery here at the Crooked 9, I fill the kitchen sink with potable water though I wouldn’t drink it after my chore is done because I know my greywater is a tepid soup of detergent and diluted debris and, anyway, it would taste like McDonald’s coffee. I open the drain knowing it will be treated and maybe even come through my tap again one day. Tar sands wastewater is something of a misnomer. It’s liquid slag whose additives include bitumen, sand and chemicals. As sludgy as most of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue. It’s collected, pooled in artificial basins called tailings ponds. They tend to leak and their toxins tend to seep or spill downstream. They do look good from above, ask a dead duck.

A commission convened by the United Conservative government of Alberta to study the environmental impact of tailings ponds (something of a shock in itself) and chaired by the Honourable Member from Fort McMurray suggests one solution to dispose of mining wastewater is burying it. Naturally, the effluence would be decontaminated before interment deep within the earth’s crust. If that’s the case, I wonder why it’ll still need to be buried. Tailings injections bring us halfway to China and the world of Jules Verne, drilling down into impermeable rock. Suitable sites aren’t abundant. Proposed captured carbon storage sites compete for space. Draining tailings ponds will necessitate pipelines. The Universal Law of Wham! applies to pipelines as much as anything else: If you’re gonna do it, do it right, now! Pipelines are efficient conduits, but improper installation and neglectful maintenance are valid concerns because there’s a whiff of Boeing ineptitude wafting over past projects. And there’s no revenue in moving dirty water and no profitable payoff to be realized in goodwill.

Love Canal was neither a soap opera nor a porn flick. Evidence has surfaced showing fracking fluids will eventually permeate groundwater. Still in dispute is whether their highly pressured injection into subterranean rock fissures triggers earthquakes. So. What could possibly go wrong burying mining wastewater tailings?

I don’t know. I’m no cynic; I’m a realist whose brain is pop culture wired. All I can picture is that last scene in Carrie. Nothing buried stays that way. As for ostriches, I assume it’s best not to see it 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 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 inane. I’ve no recourse, no explanation. Interested Canadian readers should buy directly from FriesenPress. 

SUNSET OASIS CONFIDENTIAL

Jacket Required 

Sunset Oasis Confidential has been in the marketplace for about two weeks. A soft launch. No rapid unscheduled disassembly to report at this stage because nobody’s actually had a chance to read it yet – excepting Ann, my partner in crime and more innocent capers, who patiently reviewed and corrected six drafts. All of the informal feedback I’ve received is kudos for the novel’s striking cover.

I know a guy.

Rene is the principal of a boutique Calgary-based design firm called CreativeWorks. He’s an artist in his own right, three of his works hang on the walls here at the Crooked 9. I met him thirty-five years ago when I turned up for my first shirt-and-tie job in Canada Safeway’s Alberta Division advertising department. I noticed a package of cigarettes in his breast pocket (he’s since quit). Smokers tend to congregate. We liked the same music. I made mix tapes for him. He bought me a rare CD edition of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle while holidaying in London.

Rene and I are friends. I’ve divorced three times. He literally helped me move through two of them. And if there’d been a body, I think Rene would’ve been somewhat okay burying its bits and parts too. If there’s a cosmic ledger, I have taken more from Rene than I have given him. A reciprocity deficit. But we’ve also been freelance partners through the years: “I need some copy!”; “I need some design!” Rene designed the cover and promotional materials for The Garage Sailor and the print ads for Of Course You Did.

Because I don’t reach out to people I merely telephoned Rene. I asked him if he was up for another book jacket. He agreed. I said, “I can send you a draft, but you probably won’t read it.” He agreed. I began, “All right, here’s the short version: imagine guys like us, maybe a decade or two down the road, living in a retirement home…”

A book’s cover is as important as its title. Design is another device to intrigue a casual browser. The challenge is to suggest a book’s content by alluding to some aspect of the story, a visual prompt to read the summary or blurb on the back. Sunset Oasis Confidential. Together we broke down the title; Rene and I love type fonts.

“Sunset Oasis” is squirm-inducing name straight out of a twisted marketing brochure. A resort name in a winter city for seniors in the winter of their lives. Rene’s solution was a warmly coloured sans serif, like what you’d expect to see in a discounted sun vacation print ad. He then took the type and placed it over one of his own winter scenes which in turn echoed the Group of Seven references in the novel. The juxtaposition said everything.

“Confidential” was more problematic. It’s a word associated with detective noir, thrillers and non-fiction exposes. The graphic clichés are typewriter Courier and rubber stamp Stencil, usually red. I was thinking more about Jerry Lee Lewis and Rough Trade, high school. Music. “Stairway to Heaven” shut down every high school dance in my day. I said to Rene, “There are a lot of Led Zeppelin references in the book. Have a look at their wordmark. I’m sure it’s inspired by Arts & Crafts which, I believe, was based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s hand-written blueprint notations. Tell me what you think.”

Before Rene had time to put together a couple of composites, he wrote to tell me he wasn’t “feeling so great” and needed to take a few days off. The health care system here in Alberta (despite the efforts of support staff, nurses and doctors) is similar to its judicial system, best not to be involved if you can help it. I wrote back saying he’d picked a really inopportune time to die or become otherwise incapacitated.

When Rene’s comps did arrive, I was floored. In one of them he’d incorporated pretty much everything we’d discussed, wrestled with, and then overlaid that on a collage of magazine covers. Dated magazine covers. I phoned Rene. “You didn’t even read the manuscript!” The narrator’s best friend at Sunset Oasis subscribes to a slew of magazines. They provide a little backstory, a little flashback colour in their way. “How’d you know?”

“Old folks’ homes are like waiting rooms, there’s always old magazines lying around.”

As Rene shepherded his design toward final art (he reads production specifications, thank God), he had a little fun arranging the magazines’ cover images and their feature headlines. But that’s another story.                 

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. 

SUNSET OASIS CONFIDENTIAL

Signed, Sealed, Delivered 

A new novel. Three years of writing: six drafts – a stack a little taller than two desktop printer stationers’ bundles of letter-size; reams of sometimes incomprehensible marginalia scribbled in red or blue ballpoint; a file folder crammed with notes, press clippings and examples of slick marketing materials; two title changes. All this paper tied up with string, shakily stomach-knotted with fear and doubt.

All right, here I go again on my own (Gratuitous Supertramp/Whitesnake mash-up, apologies, I’m not particularly fond of either band myself).

The premise of Sunset Oasis Confidential is simply “High School Confidential” in a retirement home. What I took away from many visits with my grandmother or mother in Montreal, and my former neighbour here in Edmonton, was mainly a sense of complaint. All inevitably sad, from the food to the company, from the childish level of rational discussion to the entertainment and activities. But in those places, I always found a modicum of humour even if it was of the tragic sort.

My friends have told me similar stories.

I remember trying to fit my mother in her wheelchair into a crowded elevator. Not a chance. As the doors began to close, I told its occupants, “It’s okay, we’ll take the stairs.” I slayed half the house, the second and third generation portion.

Nana Moore, my father’s mother was 99 when she decided to move into an Anglican Ladies Residence. She grew tired of cooking and cleaning. Nana took me on a tour of the lovely old building. She dragged her cane (Mom used hers as a pointer and a sword) behind her. She didn’t require it, but the staff insisted. Along the route we encountered an elderly woman maybe twenty years’ Nana’s junior. Nana stopped in front of her, blocking The Sound of Music video. This lady was slack-jawed, vacant. Nana said, “Geoffrey, do you remember your Auntie Agnes?” “Of course I do,” I (rep)lied (I did not recognize Auntie Agnes). “Look at her. She’s a cabbage now.” Nana gave Agnes a gentle tap on the shin with her cane. “Agnes! Maybe the doctors will give you a new head.” Agnes told me how much all the boys loved her beautiful red hair when she was a teenager. Nana said, “Let’s go.”

We sat outside together on the expansive verandah. Grey boards, white spindles, green railings. Looking north, I could just about see where Toe Blake’s Tavern and A&A Records used to be. Nana explained to me that her accountant had designated the Anglican Ladies Residence an institution for income tax purposes. And her eyes were faltering: knitting, crochet, crossword puzzles and Bridge were more difficult these days. Anyway, Agnes never was a good Bridge player.

The future is unwritten. I’ve been coming to realize that the future isn’t what it used to be. Late innings. And so I began to wonder what might transpire should I or members of my cohort end up alone in a retirement home. You can’t take it all with you, the books, the records and the Stones tour posters on the wall when you’re downsizing while your body and lifespan wither. On the other hand, memories, emotions and habits, good or bad, always weighty, will fit inside a matchbox.          

                                      

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 shop directly with FriesenPress.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Low Bars (Not Juke Joints) 

A few years ago I broke down, bought a new lawn mower, a battery charged e-tool. I knew the make and model I wanted because I’d used my neighbour’s the entire summer previous for Edmonton’s twelve mows from Victoria Day through to, maybe, Thanksgiving. It’s an efficient unit, mulching blades, 21-inch deck (Ain’t that a man?) and quiet. I can cut the lawn any time of day or night. My neighbour, Ted the American refugee, really likes my new mower, mainly because I no longer habitually putter around his garage.

We’ve had a little rain recently. Gentle, steady, welcome. The crabapple tree by the Crooked 9’s alley gate blossomed immaculate white. When I mowed the lawn last week, a sunny and breezy day, petals drifted down around me like snow flakes in a Hollywood holiday movie. Just for a moment the miraculous magic of actually existing had clarity, a sharp grace.

Just for a moment, because I had to pause every five feet to decapitate the yellow head of a dandelion. I swear to God the bastards have learned how to duck. I do not like them in our yard. Should one metastasize into a grey R. Buckminster Fuller dome of spores, I torch it with my Zippo. Unmoored spores can ride the wind for kilometres – or a yard over.  I spray dandelions with Killex on hot days when I know they’re thirsty, begging for moisture. I try to dig them out with an inefficient tool designed for the job; parsnip tap roots run deep (Dad used a bayonet. He cleaned eavestroughs with a nine-iron. Those are other stories). My preferred “Dandelion” is the B-side of the Stones’ “We Love You” 1967 single and that’s neither here nor there except that maybe a good song should’ve previously provided me a positive predisposition to the weed.

(Digressive, interrupting tangent ahead: It’s a bit of a stretch to describe the Stones’ psychedelic phase as particularly druggy because, well, gee. “Dandelion” is like a rainbow, an ethereal, mystical girl, “Ruby Tuesday” and a “Child of the Moon”. Their dreaminess may’ve been the fashion at the time, but every Stones ballad is surprisingly tender, something of a minor shock to the listener when paired with a snarling rocker.)

You are familiar with the “broken windows” concept of urban blight. Unreplaced, a single pane of shattered glass multiplies as quickly as social media memes. Thousands of broken windows now. A recent edition of The Economist examined the theory’s complacent corollary. “Public decay” suggests that ten broken windows are, for the most part, all things considered, better than a hundred. Declining civic standards are massaged into normalcy.

Take dandelions. Please. Edmonton’s boulevards and verges are rife with them. Public parks and playing fields are an unkempt yellow. The City’s indifference to its greenery is tacit permission to neighbours (not Ted) to stop maintaining their properties. Nobody seems to care. Weeds are good, make a salad, mix dandelions with kale. God, you know, if you spray dandelions somebody’s dog might get cancer and though dogs don’t vote, their owners do and don’t forget our friendly neighbourhood pollinators because everything’s connected (Note to self: Must hang wasp trap from Ohio buckeye) and, anyway, it’s “No Mow May” which is a bit like disease marketing’s “Movember” when men grow porn star moustaches in honour of their delicate prostate glands.

Everything’s connected, especially when fundamental baseline standards slip a few limbo notches. Canadian cities, most Canadians live in an urban environment, require more funding than property taxes, modest user fees and speeding tickets can provide. Political jurisdictions and responsibilities are web-like, complex, but everything that’s rotten shakes down onto the streets of the naked city. The transit authority’s underground train stations and bus shelters were never intended to be dual-purpose structures, homes for lost souls. Somebody in a higher level of government consciously and callously off-loaded that social problem.

Edmonton City Centre is a misguided downtown mall across the street from city hall. Thirty-five years ago I used to change buses out front. I’d go in frequently to buy transit tickets, cigarettes, do some banking and browse the book and record shops. I hustled through it the other day bent on delivering some documents to my accountant. I saw a lot of hoarding obscuring vacant retail spaces. I counted more security guards than shoplifters, let alone casual clientele. Christ, the anchor tenant used to be a Woodward’s flagship department store. This is the poxy face of public decay and the wreckage wrought, concealed by plain drywall. There’s no covering it up with decorative decals, snazzy graphics. Evidence of decline, of public decay, of a pervasive creeping laxity, is everywhere.

Edmonton is a winter city. Property owners are obligated to ensure adjacent public sidewalks are free of snow and ice. Up until last winter, every neighbourhood boasted a modest network of sandboxes, free grit to help citizens with their civic duty. Locating one now is an irksome treasure hunt. The City will no longer collect discarded live Christmas trees come next January, a traditional courtesy service. This is a small cut in a multicultural society, but I cannot help but wonder about that decision’s impact on service clubs raising funds to ease some other form of public decay. It’s annoying enough trying to get a healthy one home for the holiday.

Summers are short in a northern town, but the season’s days are long. Everybody’s outside, whether active or relaxing. Of course, the City no longer sprays for mosquitos, mainly because their natural predators, bats and dragonflies, don’t invoice. The invisible vise of authorized public decay is everywhere, compressed hours for public facilities like libraries, truncated transit schedules. The squeeze is applied inch by inch. There are 63,360 inches in the mile ahead. Most days I feel like we’re halfway there, sliding on down.       

                                      

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.