I’ve been floating around all day in a bit of a haze because this was no ordinary day: this was the day that I became a long-overdue full-fledged adult. This was the day I bought my first washer and dryer and fridge and stove. This was the day I purchased hardwood floors and a roof and a bathtub and a furnace and a back porch. And last but definitely not least, this was the day I bought the little yellow room:

I have to admit I love the little yellow room more than anything else in the house. It’s only 8×10, and I have no idea what I’ll use it for, but I love it.

By the way, that photo of the front of the house makes the house look enormous. Only about half of that is my house. I get from the first set of steps to just past the first ground-floor window. Those are my flowers out front, and I will try very hard to keep them alive. I wonder if I’m allowed to plant a tree? (And now that I look at it again, that little yellow room looks awfully bright. I wonder if it’s just my monitor amplifying the yellow or something.)

This is my living room, and it’s not as big as it looks either. Those real estate agents have wide-angle lenses and fish eye lenses that can make a room look curved or as long as a football field. My living room is square and a normal size.

I have a basement! With a rec room! I have no idea what you do with a rec room when you have no kids to banish to it. Is it storage? Is it where you keep your loom and your yarn stash? Or are you supposed to get a ping pong table or a pool table? There’s even a little powder room down there, and a washer and dryer. Right next to my hot water tank and my furnace. I have an electrical panel too. Me! (That reminds me – do I need to buy a ladder now that I own a house? A shovel? A level? A saw-horse? A caulking gun? What?)

My garden is very small – barely big enough for a barbecue, a little round table and a couple of chairs. It’s got some built-in planters so I can grow basil and morning glories and stuff. The next door neighbour has one of those water fountain pond things, and I can hear it from my yard, which is almost as good as having one myself. I have two parking spaces on the other side of my fence. No cars, but two parking spaces.

When you live in an apartment, a lot of stuff ends up in the living room, because really there’s nowhere else for it to go. Like, for example, the TV and the computer and the books and the mannequins and the loom. I’m kind of used to everything being handy like that. I wonder if I’ll keep it like that in the house? Maybe I’ll spread things around a bit. Three bedrooms and a rec room is a lot of rooms for one person. Maybe I’ll have a knitting room and a library and a zen zone.

Anyway, you’re all invited to the housewarming party in November. Details to follow! In the meantime, I encourage you to submit your ideas for how I might use the little yellow room.

It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.
Philip Adams

I woke up in a weird mood this morning – a good mood, but kind of a give-yourself-a-kick-in-the-ass mood. And so I did.

I lay in bed thinking about why I was hesitating on that house. Yes, I like my neighbourhood. But is it possible I’m just resisting change, digging myself deeper into a rut, refusing to take a risk because I’m scared?

I decided to get on my bike and head over to the Carlington neighbourhood and explore it a bit. See if I could imagine myself ever feeling at home there. So that’s what I did. And I found I kind of liked the neighbourhood. It has big trees and trippy little dead-end streets, and lots of gardens, and some people having a garage sale. I stopped and perused the books in the garage sale and then struck up a conversation with the woman running it. I told her I was thinking about buying the place up the street, and asked her how she liked the neighbourhood. She likes it well enough that she’s lived there since 1985, so I guess she’s even more resistant to change than me. She told me where the grocery stores were, and the community centre, and a bit about the buses, and where I could walk my dog.

I biked around a bit more and suddenly made a snap decision to buy the place. I rode home as fast as I could, fearful of a bidding war, phoned my agent immediately, and asked him to draw up the offer.

As SOON as I got off the phone, I started having second (and 3rd, 4th and 5th) thoughts. Gone was most of my apprehension about the new neighbourhood. What replaced it was a sick realization in the pit of my stomach that Bush is dragging the US into a deep recession, possibly a depression, and the US will take Canada down with it. I’m going to lose my job AND my house. If I were smart, I would have waited until the economy collapsed, and then I would have made like a vulture and bought my dream home for next-to-nothing from some poor soul who could no longer afford to keep it.

Isn’t that awful?

Anyway, too late now. I signed the offer. I jumped on the real estate bandwagon at precisely the wrong time. In a year or two, somebody’s going to get my house for next-to-nothing because I will no longer be able to afford to keep it.

I’ve spent the rest of the day waiting to find out if my offer has been accepted. I hope it has not. I hope the seller likes her window coverings and washing machine so much that she refuses to throw them in, and instead makes a counter-offer, and then I can just say “No thank you, I had my heart set on your sheers.”

My old friend Smabulator sent me a link to a review of Canada, by Jeremy Clarkson, a UK columnist who usually writes about cars, but who recently vacationed in the Ottawa area. Here’s an excerpt:

“We’re told that no one in Canada is ever robbed, butchered, stabbed, murdered or blown up by a doctor. And I don’t doubt that all of this is true. But by the same token no one in Canada ever wins on the horses, or escapes from a knife fight with their life, or has an orgasm. It is Switzerland with wheat.” …read more

Smabulator grew up here in Ottawa, and I knew him from the local BBS scene. BBS stands for ‘bulletin board system,’ which was what ‘online’ was before the internet came along. This was before Freenet, before the web, before Google, before spam, before blogs, before any of this. This was the Olden Days.

I got my first computer in 1989. Then I bought a 300 baud modem. I wasn’t even sure what it was for, I just knew I wanted one. I messed around for days trying to get it installed and working properly (something about IRQ coflicts), and finally I got a dial tone.

A 300 baud modem is how we connected online in the late 80s, in conjunction with a phone line. It was replaced by a 1200 baud modem, then a 2400 baud, and so on. There was no such thing as high speed – everything happened at a snail’s pace. It didn’t seem slow at the time, but every time you got a newer and faster modem, man did it feel fast.

A BBS was typically someone else’s home computer. It was like a mini text-based internet on which people had to take turns, because only one person could be connected at a time. Usually there was a one-hour time limit. All of a BBS’s users would live within the same area code, because to call elsewhere meant long distance charges.

Popular BBS’s were busy all the time. I’d set up an auto-dial list of all my favourite BBS’s and tell my modem to keep dialing one after the other until it found one that wasn’t busy. Then my modem and the host modem would do a mating dance and make wonderful screeching noises and that BBS would be mine for an hour. All mine.

Since everything was text-only, the BBSs tended to attract writers. Because that’s what you did on a BBS: you wrote. You socialized in writing, you wrote on message boards, you contributed to collaborative never-ending stories, and you wrote email. (Oh, you could draw pictures too – but it was ascii art, ie art made out of keyboard characters. You wrote art.)

I was known as Dr. Sooze on the BBSs, and I socialized online with people like Crass Nirvana, Flog Sonata, Smabulator, Athena, Painkiller and Mel Pheasant, on systems like The Sanitarium, Another Roadside Attraction and Bob’s Back Room. I wish I could remember more of the names. It was such a long time ago. (Flog reads this blog; maybe he can remember more.)

Each BBS was its own little community. I participated in many, but my favourite was the Sanitarium. (The last time I saw Crass Nirvana, who was the Sanitarium’s sysop, he told me he still had backups of the whole system. If he could find an old computer, he could restore the Sanitarium, and all its discussions, to exactly where it left off all those years ago. It would be like time-warping back into a party that ended many years ago.)

By today’s standards the technology was incredibly primitive, but we really were on the cutting edge back then. BBSers were using home computers to communicate with each other. Hardly anybody was doing that. It was revolutionary.

Anyway, that’s how I met Smabulator, who has since sailed solo to Scotland and is living happily ever after with his Scottish bride and baby-in-progress. He still, however, keeps one eye on Canada. And he might start writing a blog soon. I’m looking forward to that; he’s an excellent writer.

I wrote this last week, but am only posting it today because I was waiting for permission from Meph to quote his email message.

Today I had the pleasure of sharing lunch with Roy at the Lord Elgin Hotel. (Excellent restaurant, I recommend it highly.) Roy has packed a lot of life into his 84 years, both professionally and personally. He worked at least two and usually three jobs throughout most of his career, and is still only semi-retired. He was a journalist for much of his career, and a professor for a number of years. Coincidentally, the year I was born he was working as a communications officer for my current employer. Roy has written some plays, too, and a musical revue, and he started a union jazz band and a housing cooperative. He also raised five children, which is how I know him.

Today he told me stories about taking dates to the Standish Hotel back in the 1930s, and how the faucets in the washrooms were gold-plated. The expenses of a date were as follows: 40 cents for beers, a 10-cent tip for the hat-check girl*, a 10-cent tip for the server, and a 10-cent tip for the washroom attendant who held the towel.

We also talked about feminism, politicians in Canadian history, homosexuality, the pursuit of happiness and Roy’s five children. He’s a charming and talented man. We have our points of disagreement, but we’re both diplomatic about those (me because it doesn’t seem respectful to argue with the elderly, and him because it’s not gentlemanly to argue with a lady. We have very civilized disagreements, Roy and I).

I met Roy because I’ve been friends with his son for a long time. We were two of six people sharing a house on McLeod Street when I was in high school and Meph was in university. (Coincidentally I recently learned that our landlord at that house ended up serving time for throwing “a corrosive substance” on the exposed genitals of a man with whom his wife was having an affair. From what I understand, he became an artist in prison and got in touch with his more sensitive side. I don’t know what became of his wife’s lover’s more sensitive side.)

Anyway. Meph lives in a hot third world country most of the year, and is a writer. He makes an annual trek back home in July when the weather’s warm enough. (Being born Canadian was a cruel joke played on him by Mother Nature…he dresses in layers and shivers when the temperature dips below 80 Farenheit).

A few months ago I asked him in an email message what he thought of crack cocaine, as it appeared I was losing a friend to it. (As it turned out, I did lose that friend to crack. Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do or say, so you might as well just get out of the way.) At any rate, this is Meph’s crypic but interesting response to the question about crack:

it is my
understanding that while cocaine is not physically addictive (a medical fact
that has been collecting fungii) it is “psychologically addictive”, which
seems to be an awkward mixing of metephors (what is ‘mental health’, out of
it’s often insane social context, for eg) but then look at those people who
are glued to the slot machines, and also it gets some die-hardy’s to the
stage where they can continue drinking long after they would ‘normally’ have
passed out, which can lead to aberrant behaviours as well and which i can
personally attest is the real reason a couple of otherwise pretty hot bands
never made it out of the garage, and just as well it would seem)- but crack
has the reputation of being, for some, instantly habit forming to the
extreme in my personal experience i have seen a handful of people come
completely undone, and begin to behave in ways that i’d prefer to believe
they would not have been otherwise capable of pretty hard to kick, i’m
told, although i don’t really know anyone personally who’s gone through
that, or even considered trying and when someone like me doesn’t endorse
an altrernative perceptual experience, it’s probably something like one of
those astronaut training pods that make you throw up, or crack (no, that’s
bull, i’m prejudiced against painkillers, uppers, anything that changes you
linearly while leaving you intact laterally is a waste of time for me- i
find the atmosphere on your planet a little too dense, i suppose)

*Hat-check girls are so rarely mentioned nowadays…but whenever they are, I feel compelled to recite, if only in my head, Leonard Cohen’s poem And the Music Crept By Us:

I would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former SS monsters
However since it is
New Year’s Eve
and I have lip cancer
I will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance.

— Leonard Cohen

Sometimes the universe just unfolds in a way that makes you wonder if there’s somebody planning it or directing it or something.

Today I spent a fair amount of time thinking about Paddy Mitchell and how best to help get him back to Canada. I know there’s a treaty that allows for prisoners to be swapped between Canada and the US…but how do you invoke it? Who makes the decision? How does our side get organized enough to do it? I decided I should talk to Bob, who was my favourite professor at the University of Ottawa and who is an internationally acclaimed expert on prisoners’ rights (well mostly he’s a prison abolitionist, but rights are the next best thing). I looked for an email address, but couldn’t find one. I decided I would phone him on Monday.

I headed off to the Ottawa Folk Festival, and it was kind of weird – it was like I KNEW everybody. Even the people I didn’t know looked familiar. So who do I run into 20 minutes after arriving? Yup. Bob. He was talking to those two men in the photo, and I butted in. He gave me a hug and I told him how weird it was that I should run into him today, since I’d just been googling him. I told him about Paddy’s cancer, and how we wanted to help bring him home, and I asked how we would go about doing that.

Bob said he’d be happy to help, and he knew some other useful people who would likely want to get involved. And not only that – but the two men he was talking to: it turns out that one of them is in a unique position to help also. I can’t give details here, for reasons I can’t explain here, but I can say he comes from an interesting background and I’ve known him by name and reputation for about 18 years. This was the first time I’d ever met him. I ended up drinking beer and watching the concerts with the two mystery men. We also figured out the meaning of life during the Ian Tamblyn concert, and while I can’t divulge the entire thing, I can give you a hint: salmon, cicadas, and penguins.

The photo is of the two mystery men, with Steve Earle’s face on the big screen between them. The mystery men are huge fans and personal friends of Steve Earle, and they weren’t tolerant of anybody around us talking during the Steve Earle portion of the concert, even though we had talked throughout Ian Tamblyn’s set. (“That’s different,” said one of them when I pointed it out, “We were philosophizing and they’re just talking stupid.”)

And that was that. The universe opened up and delivered two key people who can help Paddy Mitchell get home, right on the very day that that was first and foremost on my mind.

I was just reading over on Miss Vicky’s blog that there’s a movement afoot to save the liquor store on Wellington Street West. I live about a half-hour walk from that liquor store, and it’s the closest one to me. Since I don’t have a car, I feel under-serviced from a liquor perspective.

This is a great neighbourhood in many ways for being car-free – we can walk downtown and we have bike paths – but it seems a number of the walking-distance stores that sell the necessities of life are closing their doors and opening superstores that are not within walking distance.

If you live in the neighbourhood (and I know some of you do) and you care about maintaining reasonably convenient access to liquor, please go visit Miss Vicky for background information and the email address of the LCBO man who claims to want to hear our feedback.