“The greatest pleasures of traveling are finding a sage hidden behind weeds or treasures hidden in trash, gold among discarded pottery. Whenever I encountered someone of genius, I wrote about it in order to tell my friends.”
- Matsuo Bashō
It was 8:00 a.m. and I was out in the sun raking the dead grass out of my lawn. Wearing a T-shirt with an image of Baudelaire and the slogan "Get Drunk” emblazoned upon it, and applying myself to the lifelong pursuit of comprehensive ear damage by blasting nauseatingly catchy '60s girl-group pop through my headphones, I dragged my green bin around the yard collecting the little piles of debris. I was even relatively well-rested and amidst this exceptionally domestic and mundane activity, I almost forgot how weird life has become.
I must confess that I have long enjoyed the odd and often insalubrious appeal of the back alleys of cities. Vancouver, Paris, Madrid, Genoa and Calgary. Yes, Calgary. Nearly 25 years ago, we opened Metrovino in a location described forebodingly and dismissively as “a back alley”. Predictions of our commercial fate were not universally positive…
The snow falls deep into April, and days that would have been considered pretty in December are now unwelcome, if not oppressive. I stare out the window and think about how atypically unsavory weather can be rendered irrelevant by exciting prospects. I suppose that in its own way, the authoritative instruction to assume that every fellow human that you see is almost certainly a vampire is mildly exciting.
It was back in the days when people travelled; you know, those bygone times when you could eat in restaurants while travelling... It seems like a million years ago, but it was actually mid-February. I was sitting in a Scandinavian-influenced breakfast place in Portland at 8 am, enjoying a drink and wondering why Calgary's bylaws prohibit the service of alcohol at such a beautiful hour for imbibing.
