05/17/2007: "Off on a Trip"

Hi All,

This is where, were I a really really scrupulous blog updater, I'd say, "Sorry you won't be getting any updates for awhile." But, as I'm not a scrupulous blog updater, I'll just say, "You won't be getting any updates for awhile. I'm not sorry." Well, okay, a bit sorry.

I'm going to France for a week or so. I'd update from there but the keyboards are all bass-ackwards so it's very annoying and I'm not sure I'll have much to report. First I'll be doing this:

www.villagevoicebookshop.com/author_events.html

with him:
www.amazon.com/Dead-Fish-Museum-Stories/dp/1400042860/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-2610069-1480608?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179435057&sr=8-1

and him:

www.davidtreuer.com

So that should be good and emasculating. D'Ambrosio taught at Iowa while I was there, but I, ghost in that program that I was, never met him. They're both fabulous writers. After that I'm off to this:

www.etonnants-voyageurs.net

where I will read with ... well, I don't know yet, but surely someone who will emasculate me.

After that I spent a few days in Toronto, crashing on my buddy's couch and getting drunk, then to NY for about 5 seconds to sign some copies of THE FIGHTER at the Book Expo America, then back here to sunny Calgary and finishing up my novel. A nice little break.

So, a few idle thoughts and observances before I go.

Thought #1: people's driving handwear. I was picking up my Mom at the airport the other day, got caught in awful Calgary traffic, spying-gum-on-the-tarmac slow, and so I started watching people. I saw this one corpulent fellow wearing driving gloves: sheer black leather, little rounds cut out for his knuckles.

Is there anything more ostentatious, foolish, and totally unneccessary as driving gloves? Back in the day, when cars were just coming into their own, when motorists had to stop at deserted country intersections and fire a shotgun to alert other motorists that they were attempting to enter the nonexistent traffic stream and radial tire sciences hadn't quite come along, people still driving on the equivalent of four revolving banana peels in France or wherever, bombing down some narrow road in the country, piloting their motor coaches, scarves whipping round their necks, goggles hanging askew on their faces, driving recklessly between the grape vines drunk on vino and laughing like loons, slewing this way and that on mudded roads ... well, maybe, just MAYBE driving gloves weren't a vestigial pretension.

But nowadays---really? Driving 50mph on the Deer Valley, in a fucking TAURUS, you're telling me you need driving gloves? Only if you're afflicted with leprosy localized solely to your hands, and your fingers are falling off, and the only way to keep the whole leprous works together is to stuff them into dopey leather gloves---that's the only conceivable way I can support anyone wearing them.

Otherwise, you're a tool. Yeah, that's right. I said it. Send the driving glove lobbyists to hound me. They're probably in league with the stovepipe hat consortium.

The other day I saw a Japanese woman wearing white gloves, like livery gloves, the ones Jeeves wears, whilst driving---badly, I might add---down McLeod trail. I know cab drivers in Japan wear them, which I think is a nice exotic touch (as a foreigner seeing it, anyway), and people also wear those plague masks like everyone was wearing around Toronto during the SARS scare, but just everyday drivers wearing white gloves? What, is it a germ thing? Lady, it's your OWN car! It's not like you've just shooed a bunch of roosting winos out of it and have to be worried about contagions! I don't get it.

Then today, weirdest thing---they say these come in threes---a saw a woman driving with one of those wrist-stabilizing bowling gloves on. I don't even know what to say about that. Maybe she'd just bowled ten frames and forgot to take it off. I mean, sometimes I go to the gym and wear my shorts home, if it's hot and I know I'll be sweating my basket off otherwise. But a bowling glove? Maybe she was reliving the glory days of the Wednesday night bowling league, the 6-10 split she picked up.

Observation #1: So I'm doing a lot of jogging nowadays, preparing for the fight, and my route, which is actually a great little route, takes me past of lot of sports fields. I see a lot of peewee soccer and baseball---the baseball is especially hilarious, as it looks like everyone, parents and kids, are out there on the field. Like, fifty people out there. Seven people crowded around first base. Kids casting these giddy but dazed looks about, wondering what the hell's gotten into their father as he screams, "Attaboy! Attaboy! Have and eye! Have and eye! No batter no batter nobatternobatternobatter!"

Anyway, so I jog past, I'm only getting these fleeting little picture-windows, these glimpses into family dynamics, etc, and I see something that is simultaneously bone-chilling and awkward:

After a soccer game, this kid, a boy, couldn't be any more than seven, he and his parents are walking abck to their car. The kid's dejected, you can tell, crestfallen---what should a seven-year-old be crestfallen about? He shouldn't even be registering emotions on that resonance yet---knees all grass-stained, his mother looking worried, his dad ... his dad just fuming. Red-faced, neck-veins bulging, the works. So I watch the dad jerk open the car doors, get them seated, lay his hands on the roof and then, in a voice mixing despair and disgust, says,

"I ... I gotta take a walk."

I'm thinking (and maybe I'm wrong, can't say as I knew them, I was a voyeur into their lives for all of twenty seconds), but I'm thinking, what a baby that guy was. What a hypercompetetive, overbearing baby. I wanted to scream, "Your kid's 7 years old, you moron! It's peewee soccer! If you gotta take a walk, why not make it off a cliff!" I mean, Lord, it was sad. And the wife, she just said, "Okay, dear, go ahead. Blow it off." Blow it off? Blow WHAT off? Take your kid to Baskin Robbins and buy him a tiger tail ice cream, you stupid jackass!

I gotta take a walk. Moses smell the roses.

One last link. I've tried this. It works. I should've done it after my last fight, though thankfully the headgear stopped me taking any serious swelling:

www.esquire.com/features/the-endorsement/heal0607

All best, Craig.