Day 9: Monday, October 29th, 2007 (Double Header! Days 8 and 9!)
Day 9: Monday, October 29th, 2007

[Okay. I just posted two blogs in rapid succession. This one, and the day before, which you have to scroll down to get to. Don't just read this one. Read the one before it too, because that is new material, and I don't mind saying there's some gold in there. While you're at it, check and see if you read the day before that too. Make sure you're all up to date, because I don't want this gold to go to waste! Okay, now I've got to go eat a burger. Enjoy!]

Well, I just counted up the days of this tour, and I guess there are 56 days in it from Day 1 when we played at Doc Willoughby’s to day 56 when we triumphantly return home to Vancouver BC and play our victorious hometown CD release show at The Western Front. So if this is Day 9, that means that we’re approximately 1/6th of the way through the tour, not that I’m counting it up like that because I can’t wait for it to be over; quite the contrary, I am having the time of my life. But I remember my brother Jon telling me about how he learned a lot about fractions when we were in church as youngsters, looking at the church bulletin and calculating exactly what fraction of the service was through and what remained. I remember when Jon told me about this, I was quite shocked, because I had been doing the same exact thing. I also do the same thing with pizzas. I look at it and say, I’m a quarter of the way through (if I’m at The Naam, where they divie their pizzas into quarters), or, I’m a sixth of the way through, if I’ve ordered a pizza from, say, Dominos (do they still exist?) or Panagopoulous (as they used to be called). So I guess I’ve eaten that metaphorical metaphysical first slice of pizza of the tour. If I can stretch the analogy, it’s the slice that you eat and you still feel great, like you could eat a whole pizza, but you’re still hungry, so you’re like “give me another slice!” the cheese is still hot and gooey, and life is great. Now, I’m not saying that by the time we get to the last one sixth of this tour my belly will be huge and distended and I will feel slightly ill and I will feel “I simply cannot eat one more bite of pizza”. I’m not saying that necssarily. No, I’m not saying that I will feel like that per se. I love it when people use per se to get out of any sticky situation. Be that as it may.

Okay, that was like the opening hymn at the beginning of the church service. Maybe while it was happening, you looked at each of the six verses and as each verse conclued you were like “sweet, only 5/6ths to go.” Then “Sweet! 2/3rds complete!” Then, “Rounding the bend! Halfway checkpoint.” I don’t know. But if you were, I hate to think how Friday’s nine-pager must have affected your psyche.

I woke up at some point, but I didn’t want to get out of bed, so I organized files on the laptop for a while, watched some Bas Rutten fights and then headed downstairs to breakfast. Glen had made some fantastic pancakes which we enjoyed a’ mightily. Today was to be a rest day, and rest we did. After the pancakes, and a shot or two of coffee, I set about the momentous challenge of blogging Friday. Well, I spent several hours tending to that and little else. I had to get every detail right! And be cooly detached and impartial to every event as it unfolded. So I blogged and blogged, then joined the McAlisters for burgers, then blogged some more. I finished blogging that momentous Friday, and then leapt up from my chair. Gadzooks! I needed to get out of my chair and shake it up a little bit, so I went downstairs and jumped rope and interspersed that with some shadowboxing and pushups and situps and back exercises. Well, that felt pretty good. I was pretty sweaty then, so I went to have a shower. I put on some clothes and zounds! fresh as a daisy!

Then, all of a sudden, “bing-bong”. What in Heaven’s name was this? Trick or treaters? Why, this is not hallows eve this eve, or even the eve of hallow’s eve, but rather the eve of the eve of hallows eve! What bedevilment was this? Why it was my dear friend Cal! But of course! We had arranged to have coffee tonight, so I hopped into her car and sped off to this place called the Something Earth or Earth Something. We listened to a really nice South African musical piece (Cal is from South Africa) as we went. Anyhow, at this coffee place I had an Americano and Cal had some tea. We both had some pumpkin ginger loaf too. We had a good chat and caught up, and I decided I would like one more shot of espresso, so I went up to the bar and waited around for about ten minutes while the one guy there single-handedly made a couple some huge deluxe meal. I then ordered my espresso and returned to the table where Cal was having an enlivened discussion with a very impassioned middle-aged fellow. I had become Cal’s “phantom-boyfriend” for the time being, which was okay with me. Sometimes ladies will do this if they feel the need to deflect the “romantic attentions” of other men, and that is okay with me. I have invoked the “phantom-girlfriend” when I find myself in a similar situation too, so it was cool. Anyhow, this guy was actually very interesting. He was a computer scientist writing his thesis on meta-data and its application on the web. This will eventually make the internet better at anticipating the way that people think and make inquiries. We talked with him for quite a while and enjoyed his very intelligent and educational discourse. It really was a fascinating discussion. I wish I could remember more about it. I would like to learn more about meta-data and its web applications. Perhaps I will.

We headed back to Cal’s place and hung out for a bit and chatted some more. Then she dropped me off at The Ship and Anchor (a bar on 17th ave that we all really like) where Kent and Brendan were hanging out. It was a really good visit with Cal, and I bid her a fond farewell. When I joined Brendan and Kent, Kent ordered us a round of Kilkennys and we talked for a while about what our experiences of high school were like. I was interested to hear that Brendan had gone to an alternative school, much like my younger brother Stephen had. It wasn’t long before we were joined by three young women, Siobahn, Anya and Juliet. We hung out and chatted and shared much laughter and lively debate with them until quite late. Among the topics discussed were; Elvis Presley: good or bad? Brendan was very much on the “bad” side, while Anya and I leapt to Elvis’s defense. I invoked Gillian Welch’s song Elvis Presley Blues to our defense. If you haven’t heard that song, I would really recommend it.

We also talked a bit about Anya’s thesis which she was writing. It was about what it means to be a blind person in a sighted world. She had received funding to go around north america getting first hand accounts about this topic. She recounted one experience that really stuck with me. In Quebec, she met a blind man who had climbed a mountain with a friend. When they got to the top, the blind man’s friend felt the need to describe in detail what he saw. But when the blind man was relating this story to Anya, he said, “But I didn’t want my friend to tell me what he saw; I wanted to live the experience as I was experiencing it.”

When it was time to go, we went outside and were enchanted to find it snowing. We walked down the block to The Wicked Wedge, but were sad to find it closed. Ah well. We bid a fond farewell to our newfound friends, and headed off into the snowy night, reflecting on how fascinating and wonderful people are.
Back home at the McAlisters’ I had a bowl of “Just Right Cereal”, watched a couple of episodes of “The Family Guy” and hit the hay. We hadn’t really managed to do any errands today, but that was alright. Tomorrow (Tuesday) would be an errand day.