Wednesday: A Walk Through Shaughnessy

Fungii. 

Hydro substation.

Dîner en Blanc

More like dîner ennuyant to me.

I cannot believe how many people want to get all dressed in white and have a dinner outdoors together.  Many do, and they seem to have a great time but I could not be less interested. Why would I want to pay to enjoy an elegant picnic for which I have to do all the work and dress completely in white? The directions are Nazi-like in their demands about dress.

I have far more admiration for the people here who organized a dinner en noir in a park on the East Side. I have little admiration for copyists and derivative invention.

Dîner en blanc began in Paris in 1988. I think it should have stayed in Paris and other cities should invent their own events. Why wasn't Vancouver's, at least, Dîner en la Mer or Dîner en Bleu?

Fads are epidemics of conformity, the antithesis of originality. How do you take pride in being part of a fad? Does participation in a fad not say that you are bereft of creativity and uniqueness?

Why not have a picnic with friends in a park or at the beach on your own?

Okay, you can call me a curmudgeon. I don't mind. I hope they all had a good time.

About Tuesday

In about 2,500 square feet of space on East 6^th Avenue, here in Vancouver, I am a celebrity—at least right now, I am. That space is Convergent’s offices and I had to go there yesterday to pick up some of my birth mother memorabilia that I had lent to them.

It is quite something to go into a building where there are lots of busy strangers are working hard and having all of them expressing excitement about the progress of my screenplay in their development process.

This morning I awoke with a clear vision of a Christmas morning in the Tyrell home when I was a kid. It’s sixty years later and still it induced a severe stress reaction.

The pleasure and pain of one's past.

Fin d'été

I want “the best” for myself in these “golden” years. Hence the new suit and other new clothes, the new table linens, cutlery and all the fine dining I have been doing. But as well as the (affordable) best for myself in the way of material things, I found myself only wanting to read, again, “the best.”

When I was a kid, I read a lot; bookshelves lined my bedroom walls. I read all text. I had, as is said, a voracious appetite for it so it surprised no one that I got my degree in English literature.

After graduation, I abandoned literature and became an obsessive consumer of non-fiction. I would binge on authors and subject areas. I read everything published by Heroes such as Oliver Sacks, Margaret Visser and Simon Winchester. I read twenty-seven books on aphasia, perhaps thirty on botany and for dessert, biographies of genii. Oh, the titles I could list here….

Then, on a trip to India and bereft of reading material, I picked up a book by P. D. James—choosing, I thought, the least objectionable of the titles available—and I became hooked on her. I read everything and the switch was thrown back to fiction. That was not so long ago.

When I read At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O’Neill, I felt that for me, I had found “the best,” which is the topic of this post. It was so good I had a bit of an Irish accent when I spoke after reading it. I thought I could never read another book after that, that nothing could ever match it.

That feeling happened again after I read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Vergese and finally with Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. After Angle of Repose, I stopped reading for two years because I loved it so much I did not want to soil my mind and eye with “lesser” work. (I am a man of passion.)

So I have finally dared to crack a spine after these past two years of savoring the memories of Lyman Ward, and I am excited about reading again.

I am also getting a clearer and clearer idea of my “chair project.” Life is good.

Picture Dump

My first blog was just about all imagery. I trashed it years ago. But lately I have been visiting Tumblr a lot and seeing gorgeous images and so I have decided to re-post some of them. Sadly, with this first lot, I have lost the sites on which I found them, but I will not do that in the future.

Recovery

It was something you don't want to see. Worse: It was something you don't want to see come out of you. It was something like in a B-movie. I coughed it up. I took a photo of it and sent it to my pulmonologist and then had a bronchoscopy (me second). 

When I have a bronchoscopy, I have to get ready for the reaction. First, I put your thickest comforter in the bathroom. Next, I put a heating pad in my bed. Then I wait until the cold comes.

As soon as I start feeling cold, I fill the bath with the hottest water possible. Then, when the shaking starts, I get into the bath and get good and warm. Then, when I am feeling brave, I get out of the bath and I wrap the comforter around myself and rush to my bed to lie on the heating pad and fall asleep with Atavan.

When I wake up, I live on liquids because my throat is so sore, and I cancel all my dates and meetings for a few days while I sleep everything off.

I still don’t know what the beastie was. I have to wait to know. I shouldn't have thrown it down the toilet. I will know what to do if there is  another such incident. They want to do cellular analyses.

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As a single person with no family, I can feel very alone when I am sick. Not sadly alone, just "on one's own." The fever that comes with a bronchoscopy is intense; I shook from head to toe and could not stop it even though I was warmly clothed and wrapped with a down comforter. It was awful. And in my fever and solitariness,  friendships felt like time-fillers. I felt everyone is alone and just involved with activities—from marriage to Facebook—designed help them believe that they are not alone.

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I have to buy a TV. I hate having to make this type of difficult decision. There are so many options and such confusing and incomprehensible terms and functions.

Sick Friday

Pooey. I am sick after enduring another scope into my lungs. The camera caused damage to my throat, the sedative gave me a vicious fever and now I am feeling like I have the flu. It's a stunning beautiful day and I am confined to bed.