Someone sent this to me from my Battle Harbour days. I can't hear what I'm saying because I have no headphones. Can someone explain to me what I'm doing preaching in an Anglican Church on an island in the Labrador sea?
Ah, now I remember...it's Kipling's epigraph to Dillon Wallace's "Lure of the Labrador Wild"
Here is a clip from the 10 minute saga "Bound Down For Newfoundland." The reason people don't sing these songs in their entirety is because they take forever. The iphone battery probably drained while I was singing.
The boogie-down diva in St. Louis bought an old record playing/8 track tape console so I'm on the look out for some Nina Simone records but really, the essential music of the LP era is Disco. Nothing says "1976" like polyester and that funky hustle beat that makes you wanna jump on your girl's rainbow striped tank top and do the freaky deaky until the Colombia gold cocaine runs out. My friend likes to dance and Disco can make anyone a dance hero. And about half the $1 records in any thrift store will be Disco related.
Here, I took a chance on a two volume set of original artists (autographed by Sonny) and a set of Disco covers by Canadian Bands of rock songs from 1977. Those will probably be a mistake. And I threw in a songbook of "Far-Out Flute Solos" because it had some Bacharach songs in easy arrangements. Hidden under there is a piano arrangement of "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" from Evita because I'm super gay.
Amazingly, while sorting through the old $1 records, I stumbled upon the final piece of my Eighties nostalgia puzzle with a mint condition Xanadu album. (Unplayed, I wonder why?) As you may not know, Xanadu and the thematic concept of a paradise both imaginable yet unreachable, is the underlying force of my novel Memorabilia. Xanadu is featured in a poem by Sam Coleridge.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree : Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Is it just because I'm lonely or does everyone get turned on by the line "But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!"
There's only one thing I think of when I read "deep romantic chasm" or "Pleasure dome"
I would go to http://www.teensluts.com/ right now and satisfy myself but I'm in the library in North Sydney, Nova Scotia. Sigh.
Anyway, my apologies to Coleridge. His intentions were probably never so prurient. So, Xanadu is the brass ring that Oggy tries to reach for in his quest to go back in time to change the outcome of the 1986 World Series. The whole Kubla Khan and magical setting are recreated metaphorically in the Bone Harbour I create with the park by the river when gay men get handjobs and the old stone church where Oggy and Kurt steal money earmarked for an Indian charity and the white fields of winter that cover the green baseball park. Basically, it's an updated version of the poem. I can hear you say, "Oggy, why did you write such a thing? Why did you spend 15 years pondering this puzzle out and inventing a metaphor that no one will ever decipher?" Well, when you are young and full of life you do crazy things... such as write a 700,000 word novel to capture the 1980s decade in the crazed obsessions of one Oggy Bleacher. Needless to say, the book was ahead of its time but can be read here in its unabridged glory.
My point is that Xanadu, the 1980 movie with Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly's unfortunate last appearance has some pretty catchy tunes and those songs become a kind of unreachable bygone Eden for young Oggy and serve as an inside joke to the whole story. All he wants to do is hear "Xanadu" because that represents his lost youth, the innocence he had before Game 6 of the 1986 World Series taught him the true meaning of heartbreak. And today I stumbled on what has to be one of the few remaining LP records of the soundtrack to that movie in Canada. It's like the wave of 1980 broke and the record washed to the very tip of Nova Scotia but the Cabot Strait was too wide for it to cross and so this is as far as it got. Maybe that's the subject of another novel.
Here is some proper disco songs to make you resent the trashy beats of today. Sometimes good music needs good drugs and early deaths and not skinny chicks like Ke$ha who are packaged like they are druggies but are actually macrobiotic yoga fanatics. Where else but here can you get exposed to Coleridge and Tavares?
P.S. I'm sure the line "When you came, my cup runneth over." refers to wine or something like that.
No video or pictures of the boat crossing as the curse of Ahab returned with high seas and the 4 dimensional shuffle inside my stomach. I sweated it out in the bathroom watching my breakfast of eggs and oatmeal flushed into the Cabot Strait. I didn't think a huge ferry could roll and tumble thusly but the waves were unrelenting. Over and over I sang, "Does any man know where the love of god goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?" I wasn't alone this time as passengers were stuffing their breakfasts into the vomit bags all over the boat. The heads were full of green faces and glasses were breaking in the kitchen. I was more sick on the trip from Quirpoon to St. Anthony but since that was the sickest I've ever been or even witnessed (the sailboat captain said he'd never seen anyone as sick in his life. I wondered if there was an award. He said no.) But I got my lesson in crocheting to set me on the path toward folk crafting joys. Ugh, I still feel the water swaying left, right, forward and down. I need a nap. Enough about me. Raise your hand if you are bored?
Look at this job opportunity in Halifax...
Program Admin Officer I-II (Climate Change) Halifax He/she is also expected to be well informed about international developments on climate change, including climate change agreements Canada has negotiated (Copenhagan Accord) or is proposing to negotiate that will have a bearing on provincial interests. Experience related to the creation, analysis and implementation of business plans will also be considered an asset. Classification Level: PR 6-10
Salary Range: $40,651 - $58,295
And this is my country... Americans are like a cult of fat, Flat-Earth nutters to the rest of the world.
The vacuum modulator saga will have to wait for a conclusion. I'm not surprised Canadian Tire failed to get the part to me because I suspect the part never existed in the first place in their warehouse in Montreal or Toronto and some order picker like me wandered out there and started to daydream and skipped that particular box or looked and didn't see it so checked it off his list and pretended he had put it in. Thanks, buddy. Even a week in Corner Brook didn't slow me down long enough to see fall colors. Everything is basically green still with the chill air arriving earlier every day and staying longer every night. 42 years every owner had managed to put the oil filler cap on after adding oil but I broke the chain and I guess it is my destiny to leave a cap of some type in every province. The oil cap bounced through the engine compartment and got kicked around by the fan until I watched it roll away under the van at 40mph, bounce across the highway and get run over by a few trucks (probably full of vacuum modulators). Could it roll to the sand? no. Could it roll to the median? No. Right in the middle of the road where dozens of cars mashed it into a lump. I was so frustrated and resentful, cursing Canadian Tire for causing all my problems that I spent three hours with all my hand tools trying to reshape the oil cap. It was made from good metal and when good metal is mashed then it is hard to reshape it without running it over with a truck, which is what happened. So, I found another use for the copper flashing the chicken farmer gave me.
I've used that stuff for everything from fixing the neutral safety switch to filling holes to patching sides, to making a rim around the speakers and as a brace for my broken ipod, and now as the new oil cap until I can find a junk yard. Yeah, I can hear the sarcastic applause from here.
So, I'm totally spent now of cash and reaching the Ronald Reagan economic solution which is to spend money you don't have. Why not?
The mouth of the Humber River on a genuinely nice fall day.
With all this free time on my hands I forced myself to swap out the Mexican thermostat. Was it laziness that made me leave it in there or was it the fact that the van would run and touching anything often leads to more trouble? Well, I knew it wasn't the right thermostat since I was in 115 degree temps when I bought it and today was frosty. Most folks in Mexico leave the thermostat out completely. So, all winter in 2009 Laconia and my failed attempt to cross the border in 2010 were with a thermostat rated for 160 when the correct thermostat is 195. I'd been using a flap of sail tarp to keep it warm but the artificiality of that irked my traditional sentimentality. Amazingly, the van ran but there was no heat and warming it up probably cost me $5 in gas. But, no more. I had the thermostat and the gasket and now I have the time and I kept hearing my buddy Dave say in his Maine accent, "Jesus christ, Paco, I could change the fucking thing in my sleep. Take you five minutes. Now get the fuck out of my garage and keep your dickbeaters off my truck." He also begged me to install a kitchen. It didn't take five minutes as I ended up finishing with a headlamp and this sunset.
I have no other news to report except that I feel my efforts will soon be rewarded with an arctic wolf encounter.
