Junelygustember
Nothing good happens if you talk about it.
If the Universe gets even the slightest sense that you’re feeling smug or self-satisfied about a looming victory, and if she feels that you are voicing this smugness or self-satisfaction to the honorable masses around you, she will move mountains to ensure that such victories do not materialize.
SHE IS, I AM DEVASTATED TO SAY, A PETTY AND EXACTING BABYSITTER.
And so, I must report that nothing big happened this Junelygustember. I did not do anything bold or daring or pioneering. I was not dabbling in iconoclasm. I was not getting quirked allllllll the way up.
… and none of it will ruin my life and make it so that I can never have a real job again and maybe go to jail in the future whentheystartjailingpeopleforthecrimeofart.
I would talk more about all of the stuff that didn’t happen, but I can’t.
I spent the bulk of Junelygustember in Montreal……. which was truly sublime.
Montreal is perhaps the only place in the world where I don’t feel like jumping in front of a train.
It’s not an electrifying city. You don’t get the sense that the world is pulsating around you like you do in a veritably global capital….
… but the texture of life is velvety enough that you don’t really care.
You can walk around with your shirt off. You can sit down at a brasserie and order a piece of chocolate cake for lunch… and you can do it shamelessly…. and the angelic, stupid-looking Québécoise waitress will bring it to you and smile… and you can literally eat it with your bare hands … or a straw … or a pair of chopsticks… and she won’t care.
It’s Montreal. She has far bigger concerns…. like not caring.
Being here feels like bowling with the guardrails up.
idk
The ugly stuff has a way of being pretty too.
The bums are blithe rather than bellicose.
The sticky garbage smell that shoots out of the laneways and hangs in the air on very hot days seems less offensive than it does in other cities.
And even when you encounter the rotting carcass of an alley cat on the side of Avenue De Lorimier — its damp coat matted, its mouth overflowing with maggots, and its eyeballs losing shape like Glosettes in the cupholder of an overheating car — you smile because you know it got to spend its dying moments in such an Edenic hideaway.
…. Which makes it hard for me to leave Montreal…
….. which would have been necessary if I had done anything bold or daring or pioneering this Junelygustember…
blehhhh
It’s difficult to decide what is worth writing about right now.
Some of my international friends have asked me about the Nazi situation in my birth nation’s parliament. “How does something like that happen?” they question.
Listen, Canada’s government is basically a big high school. There are like 400 people who run everything, and most of them get to sit at the cool-kid-table (pronounced aa-tuh-wuh) for a list of reasons that would nauseate even the mildest meritocrat. Having a sixth-grade knowledge of 20th-century history is not a prerequisite for holding office.
Hmmmmm… what else?
Oh!! some of you noticed that the release of my book got pushed back to January. Apparently there were some shipping delays caused by the port strike in British Columbia. I have been assured that the books are on their way, and that all of the insubordinate longshoremen have been dealt with in the most stern and unsparing manner.
May Neptune have mercy on their souls.
I do regret my gap in writing. I suppose I’d have a respectable excuse for the lapse if I had spent the interim period doing something bold or daring or pioneering.
In a different world, if I were a different man, I wouldn’t have been absent…
Sincerely,
Verklempt