7.04.2025 - Weekly Digest
Many of you are probably returning home from protests or at parties or partying after protesting and I want you to know I approve and would be there with you were I there to be with you. Two Weekly Digests from now I will be. Making a firm commitment to be positive about that.
Some riffs on summertime and public transportation in Montreal.
Love,
JA
7.01.2025
California. A trip over 20 years ago with a girlfriend but in this version there's a series of puzzles to solve, traps, like it's a video game. Each level is a specific dungeon, from the campsite to driving the twisty roads through the Redwoods. Saboteurs are about, villains whose purpose is to complicate the narrative. We have a safe space, a trailer, she's being patient with me as I learn how to shop for furniture and decorate. She's telling me we can afford to be a little bit elegant but I'm only concerned about stockpiling for whatever challenge comes next. The safe space has been infiltrated, I tell her, and now there's this other guy who thinks he's part of our crew but we don't want him there so we send him on a quest almost certain to result in his death. He descends into an arroyo and we wave goodbye. Good luck on your death quest! A new figure materializes on the canyon's lip. An avatar of our deity or storyteller, maybe, and he looks pissed. That guy, the guy we sent to his death, I explain, he's an idiot. The god-rep nods. He is an idiot, he says. There's something in his expression that says this isn't finished. My own culpability is yet to be established. We should go back to camp, I say. He nods again. You should go back to camp, he says.
7.02.2025
Avoiding the company of others. Not all others but this lady smells like old world rot. Swaddled like a baby in thick blankets she stands in the direct sun like she's too proud for shade. On the bus the stench is legendary. I remove myself to the last row and it all gathers back there with nowhere else to go. A cloud of microbacteria on the hunt for another biome to colonize. I wave my hands in front of me to ward them off but they're wilier than that and now I'm trying not to choke and holding my breath at the same time and the wobbling and jerking of the bus on brakes that stick and wooden dowels affixed at both ends with wagon wheels. The driver has to stop every few seconds but not for passengers. Birds flit down in front, ruts in the road have to be eased into like we're fording a goddamn river and the air circulation is just active enough to remind you that there are new smells evolving from the old ones, mingling, forming supersmells, becoming semisolid, multicolored and phase shifting and that looks like a torso now and if we're lucky there won't be a head with a mouth that wants to ask us how our day is going.
7.03.2025
More bus stop chronicles. A guy cleans the dirt patch in the shadow of the abandoned strip mall where the depanneur and laundromat used to be. Well they're still there they just don't operate like they used to. Some of us can relate. This guy is probably 60, dark with a fuzz of gray beard, backpack. He picks up rubble and stones and dirt with a flattened Bud Lite box and deposits the refuse in the trashcan by the sidewalk. This goes on for a while. I've seen people hanging out in this spot in the evenings but the way he's cleaning it up alters my perception of the space. It's a common area, maybe a living room. Worth keeping tidy. Neighbors less likely to complain. Hard to call a dirt patch a homeless camp if there are no tents to pull up by the stakes. On his fourth trip or so we catch each other's gaze and he leans toward me with a grin, says something like, for the bus, and I say oui, and I have no idea what I just agreed with him on but he seems satisfied. He returns to his chores and the bus arrives and I'm off to the office space I never have to clean. Some of the tech workers (I assume) have dumped spinach and bits of chewed meat in the sink we all share.
7.04.2025
Trapped on the metro between a pair of extremely drunk middle-aged Quebecois guys and a group of teenagers who picked at the strap from my shoulder bag while I tried to read. I said nothing and moved closer to the drunk guys. At one point a screeching match broke out between the two groups. This is not an exaggeration. No idea who started it because in a compressed environment with a high degree of background noise my neurons are confused. It's a prosthetic ear drum thing. But directionally I am sometimes compromised with regard to sound. Anyway someone started this high pitched cackling screaming thing like you might expect from a tropical bird. The other group responded. Like they were jamming, communicating. Competing. Saying look how obnoxious we can be and no one can do anything about it. The only non-participants were me and a tiny lady with a mop bucket who looked like she was trying to disappear, camouflage herself like an octopus against the vanilla pudding panels. Then the drunkest of the drunk guys stumbled over to the teenagers and was all giving high fives and saying I love the youth, you guys are the future, anyway fuck me, he says, I'm old. One of the kids yells yeah fuck you. He stumbles back to his friend who appears to have no opinion on the matter. Mercifully it's my stop and me and the lady with the mop disembark. Several steps toward the escalator and the subway doors close and we can still hear the cackling.