aMMusing

I’ve been lousy at predicting when would be a good day to go to the beach during this vacation week. I shouldn’t have wasted the opportunity on Monday because it didn’t end up being as cool as predicted at the coast, but then again, I was feeling SO sleepy and sluggish. Several hot and humid days followed, but each came with a 60 percent chance of severe thunderstorms and since I had visions of being zapped by a bolt of lightening, I didn’t venture out. But it turns out those nasty thunderstorms happened everywhere except greater Halifax. And now, there are more clouds than sun as of noon and it’s only 18C (65F) at Shearwater, but given my string of bad predictions so far, I think I might venture anyway in about an hour and it might be delightful once I get there. And very quiet, since I doubt many people would be moved to go, meaning I could end up having the entire place to myself.

I should know better than gambling because I’m not just lousy at it; I don’t like it at all. In fact, all my friends know I don’t enjoy gambling, so imagine how one of them was surprised to spot me at the local casino one Sunday afternoon many years ago. But that was back in the days when nothing else was opened on Sunday and the slot machines still took bills and spewed back quarters instead of tokens, and I needed quarters for the laundry. So my friend laughed so hard when she saw me feed a bill in one of the machines and immediately press the Cash button, leading said machine to give me back all my money …in quarters.

I don’t think I’ve spent as much as a quarter in my entire life in a slot machine. In fact, I don’t think I ever bought a lottery ticket, either. I’d sooner waste my money on other things, like gas for a short trip I can’t afford. It’s a matter of priorities, I guess, as well as the fact I’ve gone for so long without any financial wriggle room. If I break down and purchase anything, it’s because I really, really want it.

– The sleepfest vacation continues: almost 10 hours again last night. I got up at the 7-hour point because I had thought when going to bed that I might go to the beach today despite the call for possible thundershowers. But it looked rather blah when I got up and the weather office had upgraded the thundershowers from a possibility to a watch. Since there were some last night (except in Halifax proper), I had visions of being zapped on the beach; therefore, I chose to return to bed. Sunshine and very low 20s expected tomorrow and Saturday; that’ll have to do.

– Someone told me once that our metabolism changes ever 7 years or so. I think there might be some truth to that. With my eating habits unchanged, I began gaining considerable weight in 1999-2000 and reached 200 pounds by April 2004. I went on a diet and lost weight, and for nearly 3 years I’ve been holding steady between 168 and 174 on my ungenerous scale. However, what I’ve been finding weird is that, notwithstanding that I indulge more than I should in unhealthy food choices, when I’m at, say, 172, my body doesn’t look like it did at 172 a year-and-a-half or two years ago. I know that doesn’t make sense; I know I’m still at the high end of “normal weight” according to this BMI calculator, and I know in my mind that I’m faring well. But I also think I may have moved into another 7-year metabolism phase which results in the same weight not getting distributed as it did not so long ago. I’m not sure it would be a smart idea to aim for the 160 to 165 range, assuming I could even reach it.

– I have a block of clients at my other job who are gradually leaving me. It’s all very amicable; they’re just moving on, and they’re satisfied with the service I’ve provided them in the last 7 years. But this shift is yet another good reason for me to think about how I want to realign my business and move to Montreal. Several years ago, I was offered the opportunity to place a bid in the competition that led this client to where it’s currently moving, but I declined on the grounds that the scope was too big for me to handle as a one-man show. But assuming I had placed the winning bid, I don’t think I would be in as good position financially as I am today, meaning I probably wouldn’t be seriously considering moving to Montreal as I am now.

– I wonder if I’ll ever reach a point in my life where I don’t a whack of things to do work-wise. This week, I admit, I’ve been putting almost everything off and enjoying my solitude. I’m actually pretty good at disconnecting and saying, “Fuck it!” But I do wonder if I’ll ever reach a point where my plate is just full instead of always overflowing. Does that happen to people anymore?

– I checked out a new sofa and TV last Sunday. As usual, I’m waffling before making any big purchase. Late July is the earliest the furniture bank could pick up my old stuff, and I have to spend a good chunk of change of new software soon. I also bought out Junior’s lease last month and I want to pay that off by the end of this year at the latest, which I know I can do. So as I look at my old stuff, I question if it’s folly to spend $1,500+ on new stuff when the old is still okay. Plus, what about the possibility of an intercity move?

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Halifax has been my town for more than 20 years — half my life and pretty well all my adult life.

I would be dishonest if I claimed that Halifax hasn’t been good to me. It has. And so have the ’90s. Sure, I had 3 years in there when I held a soul-crushing job, but I had my first university teaching gig at 27 and then did it regularly from age 32 to 36. And, without capital much less two clues, I took the risk of starting my own business. I don’t know if I would have had the guts or comfort level to do that in a large city, for here I had the luxury of being a big fish in a small pond.

Plus, 15 years ago, the year of the 10th anniversary of my coming out, I recognized that as far as my sexuality is concerned, I had only made myself feel miserable by expecting “more” to come out of …well, you know, situations when things come! I had assumed orthodoxy for myself, assumed that’s what I wanted; but, in truth, that doesn’t fit my temperament. You might be tempted to say that it’s the time when I recognized that I’m a slut tramp, but that would be a unidimensional generalization. However, I will say that it’s the time when I recognized that, after being pegged as a square for as long as I could remember, I had assumed this etiquette to be true …but it wasn’t. It’s the time when I recognized that, but for one exception, I had always “fallen” or “drifted” into relationships.

Strangely (or not so strangely), a major turning point for me was getting my first car, Gildo. I travelled over 33,000 km the first year I had him. That first summer is when I re-found nearby Crystal Crescent Beach, where I had gone only a few times with Madame A in 1985, except that summer I wandered far beyond the so-called third beach because I had been told that’s where the horny men hanged out. That’s how I began learning what “no strings attached” meant, that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of, and that it wasn’t deserving of so much smug judgment. And there is, after all, such a thing as “taking precautions,” both physically as well as emotionally.

However, it’s also around that time that I discovered that, in a small conservative city like Halifax, there IS a harsh judgment of those ordinary guys who enjoy indulging occasionally in such naughtiness if you’re not a buffed god or a dude who otherwise exudes uncontrollable magnitism. But in a bigger city, nobody could care less. People in bigger cities are more likely to say “Whatever floats your boat” and shrug it off. Because that’s just the urbane thing to do.

Also, this city has gone from dabbling with tentative forms of urbanity to pushing unbearably strange political rectitude, like the whole no-scent nonsense. The city has practically become the world capital of environmental sensitivities, and that’s just a tediously boring distinction to hold. Yet at the same time, too many Haligonians have begun believing that this IS a major international city instead of the important regional centre that it really is. After Halifax hosted the G8 summit in 1995, the mayor at the time mused that perhaps the city should consider bidding for the Olympics; 12 years later, the city made an ass of itself by pulling out of the bid for the next best thing.

Anyway, around Thanksgiving 1999, I visited Cleopatrick in Montreal. It had been 5 years since I had been there. And that’s when it really dawned on me: not only could I see myself living in Montreal, but also I realized that the Halifax “Cool Factor” had evaporated.

I returned to Halifax and announced to everyone that within a year or two, I would be moving to Montreal. But here I am, still, almost 8 years later. Until recently I had only one excuse, but I think it was a damn good one: I had too much debt. And by preserving the status quo, I knew I could keep my head just above the water line. I couldn’t be so sure of that if I moved too far away from my client base.

But then, of course, I got my day job, basically got out of debt — I still have to pick at it, but it’s well on its way — and things are going well. And while I don’t wish to count the chickens before they’ve hatched, there are encouraging signs that it could become a steady gig. Since I work from home, whether I’m in Halifax or Montreal is of no object. So maybe, finally, the time has come.

Maybe it’s time to say farewell to Nova Scotia.

There are some cons, of course. For instance, most of the people I knew in Montreal no longer live there. And I’d definitely miss living in the same city as BeeGoddessM and Stephanie, as well as the Queen of Sheba. However, leaving a city is not synonymous with abandoning friendships. And for sure I’d miss the proximity to my beloved beach in the summer, but staying in a place for the sake of one beach that I may be able to enjoy a half-dozen times a year is getting to be a thin excuse to stay put, and besides, I love how summers in Montreal are generally real summers. As for the practical plus sides of Montreal, it’s a comfortable driving distance from Mom in Moncton and even Halifax, and I’d be 2 hours away from my sister. I also love the idea of living in French or English after so many years of being in an exclusively anglophone milieu. Plus my door will always be opened for out-of-town guests now that I’ve accepted that it’s better that I hire someone to do my housecleaning regularly.

So yeah, this rambling look at my many years in Halifax is all about my realization that I may soon have a choice, and that I’ve run out of excuses for not making it. It’s also about remembering how, at 19, I had the nerve to make a similar choice so that I would stop wallowing in regrets. Life is too short to waste it away in regrets. And while I’m not exactly a geriatric case — shut up! — I’m most certainly well into the second half of my life. I should endeavour to fill it with as few regrets as possible, so……

Maybe it’s time to say farewell to Nova Scotia.

Part: 1 2 3 4 5

Because I had transfer credits from the U de M and chose to go to summer school, I completed my PR degree in 24 months. It was cheaper that way, and it meant that I finished my undergradute studies only a few months later than if I’d stuck to the translation program. I also took a part-time job at the university in my second year, and that placed my foot in the door for my first “real” job: managing editor of Atlantis. While today most students at MSVU and the PR program are from Nova Scotia, back in the ’80s, the PR program drew people from all over the country. Many very much liked Halifax and hoped they could find work here, but the market here was (and is) too small for the annual crop of graduates; I considered myself one of the lucky ones who managed to stay.

Yet, in many ways, Halifax is an odd place for me to have taken roots. While it is intrinsically linked to my coming of age, this rather conservative seaport city in “New Scotland” has absolutely no grounding for me, a first-generation New Brunswick francophone whose ancestral roots can be traced back generations in Quebec. Plus, ever since I first visited Montreal at the ripe age of 7, I have harboured a fascination for big cities — cities with populations greater than the whole province of “New Scotland” or even the four Atlantic provinces combined. When, as a teenager, I would long for the day when I could begin living, I always imagined myself in such a city.

But, it must be said, notwithstanding my rose-coloured glasses of youth, Halifax in the ’80s and ’90s was more vibrant and edgier than it is today — certainly more than one would have expected from a city its size. The promise of offshore oil and gas was fuelling the development and clean up of downtown; music from the East Coast was coming of age; a naughty and fun underground was thriving; daring, progressive politics were nascent; the gay community was political and could boast being the only one in Canada to fully own and operate the local bar… It was also a period when colourful, eccentric mayors presided over the city, which simultaneously was a source of embarrassment and amusement. It all made for a quirky little city set in beautiful surroundings, where out-of-control urban sprawl had not yet taken hold and a 30-minute drive in any direction led to some of the most idyllic spots one could ever imagine. And what made the city even quirkier was that it was located in a province with painfully old-fashioned ways, where only a few gas stations were opened on Sunday (on a rotating basis, no less), where stores were closed on Sunday and “shopping nights” were Wednesday to Friday when shops stayed opened until 9:00 instead of 6:00, where establishments licensed as “taverns” closed at 11:00, and where booze couldn’t be bought on Sunday except if served with a meal at a restaurant. Even my home province of New Brunswick was far less uptight!

I have this odd, very unscientific theory about what may have precipitated the change to what I perceive Halifax has become. Back in the early ’80s, many Maritimers viewed Halifax as a mini anglophone Montreal by the ocean. In fact, I find Haligonians back then, with their memories of Expo and the Olympics still relatively fresh but fading fast, used to identify more with Montreal than Toronto. And I think there were two tangible reasons for that: the fact Montreal only then was losing its status as Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, and there were two daily trains between Halifax and Montreal instead of today’s six per week. While plane travel was extremely commonplace, so was travelling by train because it was cheaper and still convenient. As Toronto surpassed Montreal as the country’s dominant city and planes became the postmodern equivalent of Greyhound buses, Haligonians have been engaging and identifying more with Toronto, where the dominant language is the same as here. I know you’re probably all thinking that I’m just setting up another cheap shot against Toronto, a city for which I have avowed little affection, but I can’t help discerning the milquetoast hegemony of Toronto slowly imprinting itself on this little seaside city.

That being said, it must also be recognized that in the ’80s, Haligonians themselves planted some of the seeds for what their city has become. For instance, when I “discovered” Halifax in the early ’80s, the phrase “The Spring Garden Experience” was coined to describe the two city blocks of delightful little shops housed in the ground floor of unremarkable walk-up apartment buildings. By the mid-80s, misguided marketers failed to grasp that the “Spring Garden Experience” referred to cachet, not shopping; so they built not one, not two, but three malls on that special stretch of Spring Garden and promptly destroyed what had been a very good thing. The first mall (Spring Garden Place) might have fit in had it been the only one; the second one (Park Lane, a.k.a. Park Drain) has been downsized considerably since it opened; the third one (City Centre Atlantic) was a spectacular flop that no one dares talk about today for fear of recalling the horrors of that egregious mistake. And it was game over when Mickey D opened in the Lord Nelson Arcade. Today, no one remembers the phrase “Spring Garden Experience,” as there is nothing memorable about the product of cookie-cutters, easily exchangeable with what can be found in any other city.

And yet… Damning as that assessment is, I can’t deny that when I found myself driving along South Park at Spring Garden the other evening, with the sun shining and the leaves out and the pedestrians everywhere, I think I saw the ghost of the city with which I had fallen in love a quarter century ago. I wondered for an instant if perhaps my eyes had changed with age and thus were preventing me from seeing that the beloved is still here, or if indeed, as I fear, the beloved has withered to a pale shadow of its former, vibrant self.

I do know that my reaching middle age has to be taken into account. But as I kept driving along the city streets on my way home, I concluded that I had, in fact, only seen a pale shadow back there. A lovely shadow in its own right, mind you, but a shadow nonetheless.

Part: 1 2 3 4 5

Because my 1987 move to Halifax was Ma-and-Pa-sanctioned, pretty well the whole family pitched in to help me settle into my downtown apartment in what I would eventually refer to as “Chateau Ghetto.” At the time, it was the kind of building where there were signs that sternly declared, “No spitting and swearing in the elevators.” And I still remember how mortified I felt as my father — rest his soul — gleefully read one such sign out loud as this towering, menacing, “don’t fuck with me” black dude was standing by us as we all waited for an elevator. Spot the Bumpkins.

But how I found this apartment would seem like an implausible stretch of the Armistead Maupin Tales of the City variety, yet I assure you: All my stories are true!

When I had lived in Halifax in ’84-’85, I had been in a relationship with Hardluck. Although I shared an apartment a block away from work on the Bedford Highway with JD, whom I had met through my Summer of ’84 Boyfriend (a.k.a. Park Bunny), I ended up by November or so always staying at Hardluck’s dumpy apartment in Central Halifax. I guess at the time I was confused and thought I was a lesbian, bringing a U-Haul on her second date. Anyway, Hardluck also had a roommate, a really nice straight guy in the Canadian Navy whom we named Fitz and who had the unfortunate tendency of bringing back crabs (of the Kwellada variety) after each of his tours of duty. Fitz and Hardluck’s landlord was an unspeakably vile piece of work who believed he was within his rights to tell his tenants that they could never have company, especially overnight. Inevitably, of course, one evening in February just a few days before Fitz was to return from one of his tours, Hardluck and I got busted big time because not only was I there, but so was a friend of mine visiting from Moncton. Arriving to find out he/we had been evicted from that dump, Fitz frantically began searching for a new place and found one posthaste.

In Chateau Ghetto.

Hardluck and I ended up breaking up about two months before I was to move back to Moncton, plus Hardluck moved out of Chateau Ghetto around the same time to live with a short-term flame that lasted about four minutes. Fitz and I left on good terms — quirky as he was, he was the one who introduced me to Mike Oldfield — but I never saw him again and we didn’t keep in touch. I learned from Hardluck about a year later that he got engaged.

So back in Moncton one day in June ’87, I bought what turned out to be my first and only copy of the local Halifax rag, The Chronically Horrid, to find myself an apartment. I would have to find myself a roommate once in Halifax, but first I needed to find a place I could afford. And there it was, in black and white: an apartment to sublet whose general description fit Chateau Ghetto and whose (dirt-cheap) price had not changed much since ’85. And yes, you guessed it: when I called the number, the young lady who answered the phone confirmed that [a] it was the same building in the complex of three high rises, [b] in fact, it was the same apartment in which Hardluck, Fitz and I had moved, and [c] she was Fitz’ wife and they were being transferred to British Columbia.

But if that’s not enough for you, allow me this digression. Three years later — in 1990 — I had graduated from Mount Saint Vincent University the year before and had become the managing editor of Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal. I regularly hired students as part-time proofreaders, and two of them at the time were living in the dump from which Hardluck, Fitz and I were evicted. Not only that, but one of them became Pouponne’s partner for 9 years. And in the apartment next door to them dwelled the inimitable Cypriot Fruit with whom the polar-opposite Hiker had a fling that same summer.

Please understand that Halifax is not THAT small of a city to have that many coincidences occur. But you have to agree that if you’d read this plot in Tales of the City, you would have busted your eyes out of their sockets. Yet I assure you: All my stories are true!

Moreover, the coincidence of 1987 especially served to assure me I was doing the right thing. For you see, when I had decided to apply for the PR program at MSVU, I questioned my motives. I kept asking myself whether I was doing it because I really I wanted to study in that field, or because I wanted to come back to Halifax. I asked myself the same question from multiple angles. I recognized that prior to my ill-fated choice of translation, I had thought of becoming a journalist, and prior to that, a writer, so PR wasn’t a choice from left field given its emphasis on writing. I also recognized that MSVU offered the only undergraduate program in PR and I was given less than glowing reviews (perhaps undeservedly) of the program at Humber College in Toronto. And I recognized that the PR program seemed broad enough that, unlike translation, it wouldn’t lead me to one narrowly defined kind of job. In short, it seemed like it was mere coincidence that the program I wanted was in Halifax.

So, the Chateau Ghetto coincidence came as a kind of confirmation — a flaky confirmation, perhaps, but a confirmation nonetheless — that I was destined to return to Halifax.

Except this return was for the right reason.

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So, I returned to Moncton in early August 1985 and went on a trip to Ottawa and Toronto before starting university in September. I remember feeling rather miserable about being “back home” and, in hindsight, I should have taken that sense of unease as my first clue that I had come back for the wrong reason or, rather, that the reason for which I had come back, which I hadn’t challenged in years, had changed over time.

Yet what was — and to some extent still is — more intriguing is that I was feeling so dejected even though I hadn’t lived the high life in Halifax. Far from it! I seem to recall making $4.16/hour, which I think was about a half-dollar more than minimum wage at that time, and learning how hard it is to make the ends meet with so little. But I had done it for 15 months without touching a penny of my education fund, so I had proven to myself that I really could make it on my own. And I had made it while living through experiences that could be chronicled in a book bearing the title, 1984, or; Gay White Trash in the City.

That year in the translation program at the Université de Moncton is a bit of a blur for me today. Oddly, it felt like I was back in high school. It’s not that the courses weren’t university calibre, and it’s not that my relationships with other students weren’t good. In fact, comparatively, I can hardly speak of “relationships” while in high school because I went out of my way through those years to blend into the walls, which wasn’t the case anymore at university. But I think that’s the time when the cold reality of translation started to sink in: one the one hand, I was gearing myself up for some 30 years of translating boring administrative dribble no one would ever read, and on the other hand, I started hearing tales of translators lasting maybe 10 years in the profession before they finally cracked, became hippies, took on a barely legal lover or three, and ran off on a permanent retreat in some blackfly-infested cabin in the Yukon.

I remember the summer of 1986 being particularly bleak, despite being in the good company of my inseparable companion at the time, Sara. It was one of those humid summers when it rained during the day and cleared up at night — the exact opposite of an ideal summer. However, summer soon led to September, and after the second class of Christel Gallant’s “Introduction à la traduction I”, it dawned on me that the only argument I had in favour of completing this degree was that I didn’t want the faculty to break me. And realizing that this attitude amounted to doing a degree out of spite, I headed to the career counselling centre on campus immediately after class.

In one of his “This & That” entries (I think), Tornwordo wrote that young adults should only be allowed to register at university five years after graduating from high school. I couldn’t agree more. I think I was in Grade 9 when I was “oriented” towards translation. In other words, I was 13 or 14 years old at the time and I was never advised to critically re-examine that decision afterwards. Or — and this is a plausible explanation — I not only never allowed myself to revisit the decision once I had made it, but I also did everything in my power to convince myself that “I’m going to be a translator” was the only true narrative. I’d been taunted as the “brainy kid” all my life, and translation was definitely a “brainy” profession, so how could it not be the right decision?

Well, the fact this 21-year-old fag wearing expensive cologne and mousse in his hair — yeah, 1986 — was sitting in the career counselling centre and having concurrent epistemological and existential crises testified that it had definitely not been the right decision. It took another 19 years before I would reach a state of crisis that was even as remotely destabilizing, namely when I sought my brother’s advice on my business and he essentially suggested I put it on the back burner and seek an outside job. Clearly, because I’m basically a “glass half full” kind of guy, I have to see the glass bone dry before I finally yet relunctantly concede, “Well …maybe not.”

At any rate, maybe half an hour after I sat down at the centre and began riffling through pamphlets to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, The Quad, whom I hadn’t seen in several days, rolled in with his new attendant. Indeed, on the very same day, we had decided to drop out of our respective program. And even more strange, on the very same day, we had independently decided to look into studying public relations or communications.

At Mount Saint Vincent University. In Halifax.

By the end of that week, I broke the news to my horrified parents, promised to get a job — I even had two for a few months — and saved up some more since studying outside Moncton would require a lot more mullah.

Part: 1 2 3 4 5

In a typical Maurice digression in this post, I wrote that “I think I’m finally reaching the point where Halifax itself is getting on my tits after 20 years, so I should do something about that.” And I think I need to address that now.

I still remember that beautiful warm sunny day in July 1982 when I “discovered” Halifax — a day very much like today, in fact, except without the “Come here and blow me” guy portrayed in this picture at the Public Gardens. Halifax was nothing like I expected it would be. I was expecting it to be a lot like Saint John, New Brunswick: old, a bit seedy, industrial, smelly, a bit dull — a city whose better days were the late 19th century.

But instead I found a “small big city” with a remarkable blend of old and new, and lots and lots of trees and green spaces. Street names like “Spring Garden Road,” “North Park” and “South Park” — this was well before the cartoon — added to my sense of this city being like a seaside urban playground, and the people going about their business seemed immensely more sophisticated than the dullards in my hometown of Moncton. I still remember seeing a young woman stepping out a corner store on South Park Street late one afternoon, carrying a six-pack of Perrier water. To the impressionable teenager that I was who had never seen a non-geriatric person drink Perrier in his hometown — remember, this was 1982 and nobody drank ordinary bottled water, let alone Perrier — this struck me as the height of sophistication. My friend The Quad and I used to call such sightings “big city-ish.”

In 1982, I still had one year of high school to complete. And as I told you in “Guilty (and Not-So-Guilty) Pleasures, Take 2″, when I was 17, I desperately wanted out of high school so that I could “begin living.” Halifax seemed like the kind of place where living could be good yet not completely destabilizing: it could be different enough to force me to step out of my comfort zone, but not too far. However, I already had plans for university after high school, namely to become a translator, and the best undergraduate program in that field at the time was at the Université de Moncton. And the demand for translators in Halifax, I thought, was likely slim to none compared to Moncton, Fredericton or Ottawa. I completed my senior year of high school in Moncton, yet in spirit and in my dreams, I constantly drifted to Halifax.

A few months before graduation, I grew resentful of believing my whole life was already mapped out before me: I would get my translation degree, land a job in the public service 4 years later and stay there until I croaked. I wasn’t 18 yet, and it seemed like “living” wasn’t part of the plan. So I decided to take a year off and work as The Quad’s personal attendant, yet continue to live at home and sock away most of my income for my university studies. In hindsight, this was my personal brand of very safe “sovereignty association.”

That year, I would hang out with an Albertan woman about my age named Sue, who had spontaneously decided to live with her grandmother in Moncton after her grandfather passed away. She used to live just a small block away from me, and whenever we’d walk back home from wherever we’d been out that night, I walk her home. Evidently our conversations were peppered with a lot of “Halifax this” and “Halifax that” remarks from me, for one night she had had enough. I still remember like it was last month how she just stopped dead in her tracks in the middle of the slush on Lockhart Avenue that night in February ’84 and gave me the verbal kick in the ass she’d clearly been wanting to give me for a long time. “Just fucking go to Halifax already,” she said, her voice full of exasperation. “Stop just talking about it and do it!”

Even at 18, I was cautious before doing anything significant. The understanding I had with my parents was that I could live with them rent-free as long as I was saving for university, and I was always a man who honoured his word. But, I thought, if I promise to set aside my earnings from that point onwards, I could live in Halifax for 3 or 4 months and try to find a job there. If I did, I’d stay one year and return to Moncton to start university, but if I didn’t, I’d come back to Moncton and start university that fall. I moved to Halifax around April 22 and started work on June 13, so I ended up applying Plan A.

And indeed, as promised, I quit my job and moved back to Moncton in early August ’85, satisfied that I no longer needed to wonder what it would be like to live in Halifax. I had done it, loved it, but gotten it out of my system. There was a concert on Citadel Hill the weekend I was leaving, and appropriately some group sang “Farewell to Nova Scotia” (mp3, 2.3 MB, 3:20).

I had no reason at the time to believe I would live here again.

I might live to regret it, but I decided not to go to the beach today. It’s a beautiful sunny day, and if the current temperature at Shearwater (on the southeastern edge of Halifax Harbour) is a reliable indicator, which it often is, it is probably gorgeous at Crystal Crescent Beach right about now.

But on the other hand, there are five fingers. I refuse to set the alarm clock while I’m obstensibly on vacation. Instead, I choose to sleep as long as my body requires. I did wake up at one point which would have been a reasonable time to prepare for a beach tour, but my head felt like it was being weighed down by a block of cement — no, I didn’t drink last night — so given a choice between getting up and sleeping some more, I chose sleep. And I rationalized that I would get some freelance work done once I got up.

So far in the last few days I’ve managed to do very little of any significance while I’ve been awake, and that might be the kind of disconnect I crave, both consciously and unconsciously. But for someone who’s accustomed to always being productive in some way or another, it feels a little odd.

There have been powerful, destructive tornadoes for two days in a row in Manitoba.

I spent the whole evening going through the video clips at TornadoVideos.net. Those storm chasers are completely nuts …but at the same time, I can understand what’s drawing them.

You see, I love thunderstorms. And extreme weather fascinates me. But having experienced a Category 2 hurricane in a place where such storms are uncommon, I have to say that tornadoes are one type of extreme weather I never want to see up close. They are so frighteningly absolute in their destructiveness.

Tornadoes are more likely to occur in the Great Plains of the U.S. and the Canadian Prairies, although much of the eastern U.S. and southern Ontario are prone as well. But perhaps what struck me the most in those videos is the stark beauty of the plains/prairies. The towns and cities look depressing to me, but oh, that open sky and those lush fields! And that’s coming from someone who has always lived near the ocean and probably couldn’t stand being landlocked for very long.

It’s just a coincidence that I was listening to CBC Radio 2 tonight. I parked my car on the street this afternoon, so I needed to park it in the garage for the night. But I decided to go for a quick spin downtown to verify that, indeed, this town is so dead on a Sunday night that we’d might as well fold the sidewalks and turn off the streelights. I think I’m finally reaching the point where Halifax itself is getting on my tits after 20 years, so I should do something about that.

But I digress.

Just as I was parking my car in the garage, “Nightstream” host Danielle Charbonneau decided to play what I’d describe as a techno / trance / ambient piece I never heard before: Hypnotech 3′s “Images in Moog.” I rushed up to my apartment to resume listening to the piece AND search the ‘Net to purchase it. But to make a long story short, I could download a bunch of other tunes by Hypnotech 3 FOR FREE, but not the one I wanted. The best I can do is have a personal link from SoundClick. Trust me: I searched and searched and searched, and that’s really the best I can do.

That bugs me to no end. I’m willing to fork out. But I can’t.

Addendum
– Hypnotech 3 has commented to this entry!
– I just discovered that I can link to link to my SoundClick profile and you don’t have to sign in. But I’d still like to listen to this somewhere other than my computer…