for good or for awesome

Something like a month ago I made a proclamation to the effect that I was going to get up at 8:00 every day. Laughable! I know. It's futile, you know. I woke up snug and cozily today after some bizarre dream involving antisymmetric tensors.. blue sky.. 11:00. gah.

I find myself wishing that Hunter S. Thompson studied physics. Preposterous! I know. But somehow, grinding away at the quantum mechanics makes me think back to "We were on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." I mean:

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....'" And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'"

Whoah. Maybe I'm crazy, but that's up there in my list of book openings. Also: "The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." And something about the Nellie, a cruising yawl, and the sea-reach of the Thames. It bears repeating:

"The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. "

Pure genius. And to me it all comes together into some techno-dystopic view of the Future, the Heart of Darkness, and the American Dream. All of this, by the way, is majorly parenthetical. Tensors are kind of dystopic themselves, you see. Maybe that's why I have it on the brain.

* * *

We drove to Toronto this weekend. The best part was seeing Kaya. At her co-op house we were suddenly amidst a zillion internationals. French, German accents. Then I heard somebody say "budapest" and I had to interrogate him. "I'm going there next week!" "I lived there for ten years!" And on a napkin was scrawled a list of mandatory bars to attend and liqueurs to sample.

Ryan (four) was radiant with pride when we found ourselves at the Wavelength 250 music festival, floating amongst a crowd manifestly of Toronto's most hip, most indie, most in-the-know kids. I wandered by a conversation on the subject of the Reformation. And we were forced to admit, his finger really is on the pulse of fashion. How he knew of this thing, he would not tell. I mean, six eighths of originality is concealing your sources, no?

The after-party was at 56 Kensington, to which, independently, Kaya had invited us. She'd said it was "proper," which scared me, but it turned out that, "proper means, proper given a Kaya framework of opinions," a framework of opinions that says a proper dance club is one where you can go in the shirt you've been wearing for six days. Maybe you can see why we're friends.

Roadtrips are hard with three people. For me at least, and I don't know why. It's like somehow things require a little more planning, or maybe it's just that the age-old driver-navigator dyarchy is replaced. Or maybe simply that I was in some caffeine-[or-lack-thereof]-induced funk. We stayed at College Hostel; I suppose what it lacks in pizazz it makes up for in covered parking. Toronto on the whole seemed decently bustling but it's hard to get excited about it in the same way as one might about, say, Montreal. We did have dimsum for three for 21 Canadian Dollars, and anywhere where that is possible can't be too bad.

In the morning, Brette (narrow_bridge) guided us expertly through the gridwrought streets of Toronto. Our destination that day: the Port of Toronto, where our dear Fast Ferry once docked. We did find it—that did involve being chased away by security guards insisting upon knowing exactly what part of "no trespassing" we did not understand—somewhere out amongst the staged containers and the old decaying freighters is the old terminal, Toronto rising up in the distance.