Nomadic Tribe Soup

"You'd make an awful nurse!" I have been told twice. Not that I harbor some sweet affection, deep understanding or an overflowing nurturing capacity that's yet to be unearthed. I am grumpy and impatient. Some like it hot-headed. In December 2009, when Robin was frail, transparent and wheezing in the bed he would soon die, I was spraying fake saliva into his mouth and missing the point, I was fixing his pillows to the most uncomfortable position his bones could ever bear. Of Robin, nothing was left but bones. Robin had a T-shirt with Alfred Hitchcock's head in a glass bell jar or an astronaut's helmet that sat perfectly atop his jolly good and mighty belly, giving Hitchcock a 3D quality somehow. That was when Robin used to cook lamb shanks, we'd drink quite a few bottles of wine each, there'd be some singing or somber discussion on the state of academia, he would at some point cheer up, recite dialogues from movies I'd never heard of. As Robin melte...

I should have been in bed by now but I didn't get my daily dose of silly things. Some people take a glass of milk before they go to bed, I wouldn't mind a glass of wine or just a few absurdities will do.  Here is Zeynep's puppet. As much I love the mess I generate myself, I'm particularly fond of her messy desk. Now I can get some sleep.

I don't let myself write blog posts because I am behind with some monolithic, oppressive and pending-like-a-pendulum writing. I self-impose sanctions sometimes, imagining one day I can discipline myself and become a productive tennis ball machine pumping out only meaningful words, worthy observations and downright brilliance. But most of my self-education goes awry and the rest goes haywire. Things I forbid myself from doing return before even they are repressed. The Heir of Ossington, who no longer lives on Ossington explains that it's 'the eroticism of transgression', sort of George Bataille for people with a hangover. 'The self imposed limits are too delicious not to trespass', he says or something like that because one can never quote HoO exactly the way he talks. What tickles my fancy now is Yahoo News, the sort of news headlines that chain J Lo's low cut jeans to torn clothing containing corpses in the rubble of an earthquake. Yahoo Canada provokes m...

When he could barely talk, Maxou was already telling lots of stories and asking plentiful questions. "What is your house made of?" he would turn to me while we watched the psychedelic Québécois children's series Passe-Partout -revived all the way from the 80-90s. "Brick, stone or wood?" He was two when Sophie and I took him to Marché Jean-Talon and though he didn't see me again until he was three, he clutched onto that memory and the chocolate covered bananas we ate at the market like some ethereal doudou. Our crush, you see, was simply mutual. Before Maxou and Romane ever existed, Sophie and I were biting into burgers and fries on Avenue du Parc. It was summer 2005, we were on an escapade from the Rebel Music Americas tour and its opening night concert at Kola Note. "I don't feel any biological clock ticking. Mayo?" She was planning a trip with JP to Mexico and why not, perhaps to Turkey. Free. Carefree. No squeaky objects on the floor in th...

Summer rolled down the stairs and evaporated into thin air. Effervescence, thy essence escapes me! ...unlike drunken fruit flies. This summer, besides delving into radio programming, festival hopping, horizontally savoring parks, I've become a master of drowning fruit flies in leftover wine. Tomek had taught me the trick back in the day, with vinegar in a glass, covered by poked plastic wrap. Fruit flies in Montreal are fancier than those in Toronto, so beaujolais and not rice vinegar. I gather they also like lager. Between heat waves, humidity, occasional thunderstorms, joy, pain, a series of visitors, dozens of bagels, broken promises, midnight graffiti'n'stenciling and Gregorian chants...between newcomers in my life, a few exits, a bunch of 'something in the air's, a swim in a lake in the dark as lightening cracked the skies...somewhere in the middle, over the top and underneath I lost track. Losing track, as it were, is a guilty pleasure of mine, ...

Driving against the sun feels like being the murderous L'Étranger estranged to the limits of bright light and heat. On Autoroute 10 Ouest I'm listening to rock classics on the radio, singing out loud alongside Jim Morrison 'People are strange when you're a stranger.' I'm on my way back to Montréal in a borrowed car (merci Francis!) having just hiked my way up to the Owl's Head Mountain with a semi-stranger. Suddenly my index finger, of its own accord,  proceeds to preset 1 button on the display of the radio '....Jack Layton était....un choc...il avait....'. Jack Layton is dead at the age of 61. My heart sinks into the shade of a passing truck. The leader of the New Democratic Party until recently when cancer no longer permitted him, Jack Layton stood for that rare political zest: hope for social democracy in a conservatively regressive (régro-cons, if I may) Canada. The designer of the bike parking poles in Toronto, owner of a tandem bike he used t...

Shirin says it takes her a while to feel awake in the mornings, and she takes her time. As wide as her smile is her heart, this femme extraordinaire came into my life via my yellow tuque -for which she wrote a little poem. I imagine Shirin opening her big drowsy eyes, the vinyls from the night before in the living room, the vintage cookbooks in her kitchen... How still is everything in the morning. Sweet temptation of lingering. When I wake up these days, it is usually to the sound of someone playing the piano across the back alley my bedroom overlooks. Nothing like a back alley 'une ruelle' in Montreal in the summer.  La ruelle, that wonderful hideout between streets filled with cars, noise and speed. In the Plateau, the pattern is one street followed by a ruelle, then another street, another ruelle. To counterbalance the roar of motorized vehicles, the rush of our anxious civilization, ruelle lingers. The leaves on the giant tree rustle, some sleepy head pops up on a balco...

"No more fence sitting!" ushered T. Lotsofconsonantsforalastname, when he asked me if I was returning to 266 to retake my room and my role as Dave Number Three. After all, Henry and Justin, the bubbles of mold on the kitchen wall were getting lonely and he could use some help taking the garbage out. I never returned to 266 to live although of all the places I stayed in Toronto, it resembled home the most. And perhaps that is why. I am always fence sitting between places, affiliations and even time. I'm somewhere in-between Toronto and Montreal, between past and the present, between celibacy and commitment. I am accumulating perfectly halved experiences, half-hearted romances, a half and half consistency of thoughts and wishful thinking. It is a state of being, as all the decisive people order their complex drinks at Starbucks or similar chains in perfect fluency, knowing what they want, with and without this and that, in this size, I imagine myself standing there, amaze...

  I'm at the corner of Victoria and south side of Dundas Square when I hear the Soulman sing Rick Ashley's "Never gonna give you up".  He sets the mood. Gonna to stick around for a while. Right in front of me is O'Keefe Lane, a back alley that ends in an architectural gem of a cul-de-sac. If I needed a snapshot to fondle the love part of my love/hate relationship with Toronto, the memory of this would suffice. This and the Soulman. http://vimeo.com/23830661 http://vimeo.com/23827881

Saturday morning I wake up to the sound of drilling (brought to me by drill machines, drillers, dig&destroys, concrete-fighters?) in the backyard and it is not even 9am yet. My headache stalks me to the Portuguese bakery across the street where one short espresso shot does not do the trick. I don't have change for the second one. I suggest to the gentleman behind the counter he write my name and the amount owing on a piece of paper, like his wife always does. He waves his hand mid-air, palm down, to the right and left. 'No need to write, you give it to her next time'. God forbid I ever live in a place where the concept of 'veresiye' (Turkish for give away, based on trust that compensation will come along, eventually) does not exist. I'm too lazy to go out and join the HotDocs crowd to watch documentaries. Too uninspired to go to the editing suites at the university to cut some slack. To cut some footage. To cut a lean slice of video. Too weary to read the ...

I can't sleep. First I see the headlines on TV: Osama Bin Ladin's 'recovery' by the US 'authorities', the US in 'possession of' Bin Ladin's body. The wording of such news flashes works on me like car alarms that go off in the middle of the night. Shortly after, Obama makes a speech involving America as a united family, past killings leaving empty seats at the dinner tables nation-wide, why it is necessary to kill those embodying a threat to the global control the military and intelligence worked so hard for. Traditionally these 'kill next-in-line' dictators, dissidents, shady men belong to oppression stricken nations in possession of white substances on the surface or black substances underground. I was at the airport when I first saw images of a wild man whose body had been traced, tracked and captured by the US eight years ago. Saddam Hussein had an abused and reality-defying look in his eyes. His physical disarray was projected on the sc...

"What's up ice eagle?" beams up my old Nokia phone. A text message from Boris, an indication he is back in town. I walk twenty minutes through a snowstorm to join him. Snow, even in spring, makes me happy by default. "My heart started beating fast as I approached Heidegger's house," he recounts his Freiburg escapade as we munch poached eggs at the Starving Artist. "The feeling dissipated when I reached this residential area, rich people's houses." I am glad he is back. I wish to keep him with me, prolong the time before we disperse to our respective libraries, deeds, tasks, plans, procrastinations. We head to the counter to settle the bill. "The interac's not working," says the server, "pay next time". I write my name on a piece of paper. "How do you pronounce your name?" is the next inevitable question. Tobias (yes, our server picked that 'English' name before Arrested Development) challenges me to his...

in a small room filled with cables and electronic gadgets and clothes out of my emptied baggages in some "turn right after migros, and then, take the first left" street in a middle-class tall building filled old neighbourhood of Istanbul, I scream to those people who have their home and roots and jobs and belongings and future-heres and feeling-homes.... "I AM HOMELESS!" I though I was coming home, for I was out of home for so many years, yet, walking in these streets, where I had walked a zillion times with so many feelings and hopes and worries, I felt no nostalgia nor coming home. Instead there was a washed out feeling of "oh, I have been here before". SO, Istanbul, you shall no longer be my home-city-that-I-was-once-in-love-and-that-I-left-in-tears Instead, you are the rotten-city-destroying-and-shamelessly-forgetting-everything-that-made-it-Istanbul. you are not my home.

We live in a distraction-ridden world. Our everyday becomes a series of livelihood shards, trivia dumped on us and we peeping our way into others' existence. I can't shut down the advertisements lurking behind every window I open on the web. All I want is to write an e-mail in peace, without anything moving on my screen. I don't want to know how many balls are bouncing. I have no interest in açai berries. I don't want to find out what part of my brain I use and please, somebody hack that ballerina out of sight. I was consulting the wisdom of Merriam-Webster on line, when alas, a 'trend watch entry' grabbed my attention by the balls. Such is the anatomy of my attention, it is a fragile beast. The word "phlegmatic" was associated with Julian Assange and the capsule featured a white haired, serene man wearing a grey suit and a red tie. The newly iconic image of Julian Assange. "After WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested and kept in cus...