Remember when the city was beautiful with light and we were full of joy and hope? 
Remember that?
Yeah, well, it’s over.
Ice Friday: Pirandello’s “One, No One”
The idea that the others saw me as one who was not I as I knew myself, one whom they could know only through watching me from outside with eyes that weren’t mine, giving me the appearance fated to remain always an outsider’s to me, though for them it was inside me, mine, a life which, though for them it was mine, I couldn’t penetrate: this idea allowed me no peace. 
How could I bear the outsider in me? This outsider that I was for myself? How could I live without seeing him? Without knowing him? How could I remain forever doomed to carrying him with me, inside me, visible to others and beyond my vision?
Canada’s Soul: Reflections on the Trip
I wrote copiously, much of it drivel, during and after my cross-country hitchhiking trip in 1983. The only bits worth anything were my notes on what happened – car types, driver descriptions – as scant as they might be, and my expenses:
June 21: Joe Louis & Pepsi ($1.05), 2 milks & water ($0.70), Quarter pounder w/cheese & root beer ($3.50), Auberge des Jeunesse ($5.50), Bottle/red wine ($6.50), Smokes ($1.90) 
July 16: Donut & OJ ($1.60), Smokes ($2.00), Big cookie ($1.00), Apple ($0.18) , The Return of the Jedi ($5.50), Alphagetti ($1.00)
I met a hippie who everyone called The General. “So I came home last night and there was smoke everywhere, even out in the fucking hallway. So I went into the bedroom and kicked the bed and yelled, ‘Wake up, bitch!’ I asked her where the smoke came from and she said, ‘Out of my camera! Out of the fucking camera!’ Turned out she was cooking bacon and fell asleep. When she left for work the next morning, I yelled after her, “Goodbye, bacon burner!'”
I found three commonalities throughout Canada: 1) War memorials 2) Globe & Mail Newspapers 3) An abundance of pornography. (Bus driver: “You writin’ a dirty letter?”)
And finally this…Contemplation of how extremely solid the earth is. Just try hitting it.
Canada’s Soul: Vancouver to Toronto
August 6, Ride One: Vancouver to Winnipeg (Brown van) Shared cost of gas with Obie (van’s owner), two English guys and Steph. Left at 10 am, Wednesday, arrived in Winnipeg at 3 am, Friday, August 8. 
August 8, Ride Two: Outskirts of Winnipeg to highway turnoff (Pickup truck) Driver asked me to open the glove box where there was a hardcore porn magazines. He said, “You know, I like to look at the guys as much as the girls.” I tried to be witty. “That’s very open-minded of you.” He asked me if I wanted to come back to his cabin for a blow job. When I declined, he asked if I’d like to come back to his cabin for a sandwich. I declined that too. “I know a lot of guys who aren’t gay but like to be sucked off.” I nodded that I understood.
Ride Three: Highway turnoff to St. Anne (1955 pickup truck) Driver got me high and gave me sunflower seeds.
Ride Four: St. Anne to Falcon Island Park (Small blue car) Two girls, both nervous about picking me up. I told them about the hardcore porn, the offer for a blow job and a sandwich and then getting high, all of which made them more nervous.
Ride Five: Falcon Island Park to Toronto (Dodge car) Wax and Di, coming from a military base at Portage La Prairie. Overnight drive of almost 1,500 miles, right to my house. I should have invited them in but didn’t because I just wanted to go to sleep. I felt bad about it then. Still do.
Canada’s Soul: Whitehorse to Vancouver
I took a bus up to Whitehorse, Yukon. (I didn’t hitchhike because I was scared of being left in the middle of nowhere and getting eaten by a bear.)
July 20: A 24-hour delay seems possible due to the massive bridge washouts – sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Throughout the journey, women – making up the majority of the population – sleep, smoke and drink without complaint. So I’ll smoke my way to sleep.
The silhouettes of the great mountains dominate the scenery. A dark black storm cloud approaches; hell is bound to break loose. The trees await in silence as the silver bus rushes on.
July 22: I hiked alone up Grey Mountain, on the outskirts of Whitehorse, and wrote at the top: Humanity – a definition. Impossible. It is so assorted. There are some with no legs, some with no eyes – mentally and physically – and some with no heart. Some cloud their eyes with darkened glasses and some wear not what they need but what others say. (It goes on.)
July 24: I took a 26-hour bus ride down to Vancouver. Graffiti on Pink Mountain Inn: #1: Why did God give seagulls wings? So that they’d be able to beat the Indians to the dump. #2 Toking is like working here. The harder you suck, the higher you get.
Arrived in Vancouver where I stayed at the hostel for five days and saw Peter Gabriel and David Bowie and the newly-opened BC Place Stadium.
Dreams of You
I was walking down the sidewalk with friends and saw you, sitting behind a large plate glass window. You were wrapped in a large blanket and smiling. I waved and you waved back. I continued on, wishing to leave you in peace, but thought again and came back around. I went up the steps and gave my name. It appears you were staying in a hospice of some kind. I went down the narrow halls, through the darkness, and sat with you. 
Your face was black and blue, and you spoke animatedly of hearing death, something your father had taught you. It was an intense moment, desperate and close. And then you told me you could not eat sweets and crawled across the floor and produced a specialized beer that fermented in your glass. I drank a can of Budweiser. And then many of others were there, banging on the plate glass window. Someone tore up a tree and wielded it like a toy, and I yelled at him for that. But I didn’t know him. And then I was on to something else.
Hollywood Sci-Fi’s Triteness of Time
Arrival has some moments, many deep loud sounds and a cool circular alphabet, but is burdened with yet another trite spin on our perception of time. 
The fact is that we human are constrained to a linear understanding of time due to gravity – not only the rotation of the earth but that of the moon and sun as well.
Our feet are firmly planted to this ground. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughter House Five: Transfalmadorians saw time like they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. 
But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eye-hole through which he could look, and welded to that eye-hole were six feet of pipe.
Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, humans not limited by that six feet of pipe, have made us aware that time is relative, not a constant, but a variable. 
This idea of time being a dimension is gold for science fiction – including my own Anori Trilogy – because the author is only limited by perceptions, able to contract and pause, even reverse what we thought could only be one way. And yet the startling concept is regularly fumbled, beginning with H.G. Wells rudimentary application in The Time Machine.
The incipient pattern has continued. Inception created a childish world where the rate of time slows by halves in the subconscious, while a vast array of movies – such as the Terminator franchise – send messengers from the future to wreak havoc on today. Interstellar offers the tritest concept of all: a physical space where moments may be checked out of a galactic library. 
Arrival doesn’t do much better than this. (Spoiler alert unless you’re reading this in the future.) The opening presents itself as a flashback, only to be revealed at the end as the future – not a sleight of hand but a lie.
It, like Passengers, was doomed from the get-go, as Hollywood knows nothing about time, except that it’s money and that the first box office weekend better not be a black hole.
The most provocative film on time would have to be Primer; everything it lacks in budget ($7,000) is made up for in concept, the kind of thing even Einstein might enjoy.
Canada’s Soul: Saskatoon to Edmonton
July 15, Ride One: Saskatoon to North Battlefield (Souped-up Trans Am) Nice Indian guy who used to be a dealer; into motorcycles and Van Morrison.
Ride Two: North Battlefield to Peynton (Camper Pick-up) Old Indian man with weathered skin; lived on the reserve, very friendly. 
Ride Three: Peynton to Lloydsminster (Air-conditioned Oldsmobile) Singer with a thin half-beard. Doesn’t like Indians because they “cut holes in the side of the house so their horse can drink from the bath tub.”
Ride Four: Lloydsminster to Vermillion (Blue Phoenix) Mild-mannered driver who has worked and lived all over the country.
Ride Five: Vermillion to Edmonton (AMC Meteor station wagon) Quite political, doesn’t like sports,sausage buyer, has a water tower for sale.
Canada’s Soul: Winnipeg to Saskatoon
After a visit to the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg and writing of “the gatherings of self-made gods separated by a golden rail and velvet curtain”, I continued west.
July 11, Ride Two: Winnipeg to Highway 16 Turnoff (Red pick-up truck) Part of a small convoy of Indians headed north. “Hey, back there, you want a smoke?”
Ride Three: Highway 16 to Regina (Blue Chevette) Jeff Gibbs on his way to Alaska. Was with the military in Germany, worked as computer programmer for Pershing missiles. Did acid on Check Duty. Derided quality of commercial gasoline as – ‘ass gas.” 
I spent two days in Regina where I met a couple in the park who had won a radio station contest and shared their fresh-caught salmon and case of beer, the man telling the story of almost being captured by a zombie witch cult.
July 13, Ride One: Regina to Wattrous (Old pick-up truck) Driver looked like a maniac – wild hair, stubble, weird look, dirty green shirt. “If you run out of money, you’ll just have to get some more.”
Ride Two: Wattrous to Saskatoon (Blue Meteor station wagon) Middle-aged woman with two small kids who made her turn around and pick me up. “You should write me to show me how well you’ve done.”
A Very New York Christmas
After a quiet day indoors, I went to see a movie at an art-house cinema where the clientele, mostly in their later years, were anxious and perturbed, snipping at each other for better seats, unhappy with the lack of air conditioning as well as the tight quarters, leaving my neighbor and I both to wonder aloud why we had left our apartments in the first place, even if the film was fine, which it was, German and provoking, as was the bar later on, except that the clientele was perturbed there too, drunk maybe being more accurate a phrase, anxious for the next round or just be less alone…
…while the bartender loudly repeated his story of getting so sick of a woman who wouldn’t stop playing George Michael songs on the jukebox, so sick of listening to George Michael songs that he not only didn’t care that George Michael had just died, but more than that, he would rather listen to absolutely anything else, even The Chipmunks’ Christmas Don’t Be Late, than another one of George Michael’s fucking songs, and told her if she didn’t like it, there were two doors and to use one of them, all to the delight of his patrons,all of whom wanted another drink, anything not to have to go home because there was no one there. Or maybe that was all me.