7.11.2025 - Weekly Digest

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Now that's value! he typed, and threw up on his shoes.

Last full week in Montreal. Next week's dispatch will be sent from Detroit. Almost even convinced I'm ready to get into it. Let's get into it.

-JA

7.08.2025

On July 1st all the renters in Quebec have to move. A tradition started out of sympathy for serfs so their evil landlords couldn't evict them in winter. So you get evicted in summer instead. Far as pain in the ass traditions go this one's pretty impressive. Traveling for Thanksgiving, for instance, sucks for everyone. Shopping around the big monotheist holidays is rough too. But this one mandates, not even by law but by convention, that every poor sonofabitch renter in the entire province has to find a new apartment and move by the same date every year. You can imagine the strain. Think about the most crowded neighborhood you know in the densest city. Now think about it with moving trucks and appliances and everything being in motion all at once. I mostly stayed inside that day but what I saw was harrowing.

One July is also Canada Day, which no one cares about here because they're moving. Not renters anyway. Homeowners may feel more patriotic about things. The lady I'm renting from attends and teaches Latin dance classes five nights a week. This and battling groundhogs in her garden are her passions. On Canada Day they went to find a place to watch fireworks. I did not join them. Nor did I look for other Americans to blow things up with on the 4th. Reckon there's a time and place.

7.09.2025

Bus drivers look you in the eye when you board. This is not behavior I notice elsewhere. If anything folks here tend to be aloof, averse to eye contact. Stoic and unrevealing. If it's part of the drivers' training I wonder what the purpose is. Are they checking for suspicious behavior? Signs of madness? I feel self conscious, will surely fumble the transit card as I press it to the reader and let it fall and in my nervousness I will stoop to grab it and the passengers behind me in the bus doorway will have the rhythm of their movements interrupted; a chain of upset expectations, someone falls to the sidewalk, another is concussed, the alarm spreads to nearby pedestrians and streets department workers who in their orange vests make the whole situation look a lot more serious and official than it needs to be and in their distraction a jackhammer goes rogue and cuts through the water main and now the bus driver shuts the engine off and we're all stuck here while I try to get purchase on the lip of the card and it skates further into the bus and there's shouting in French and in English and in Portuguese and emergency sirens break out, where are those coming from, where is all this water coming from, and now I'm about halfway down the fuselage if that's the word for it and I still haven't paid my fare which makes me a hitchhiker and therefore a suspicious person which could've been avoided if I weren't being stared at intently like I had something to hide in the first place.

7.10.2025

Sidewalks. Which side do you walk on? Six months of daily 8-15 km walks and I still haven't figured it out. More of a concern when there was only a single track down the center, weaving back and forth, irregular and unpredictable, climbing the snowy embankments, ending in a poubelle or an array of uncollected trash, forcing you into the street where you have to contend with drivers for space. Still it's an unsettled issue. Always in the way or getting cut off. I'm rarely in a hurry here but it's the principle. Maybe no one is in a hurry here and it doesn't matter.

Everyone under 35 here dresses like Billie Eilish in outsized baggy clothes with too many pockets like we wore in the 90s. Vintage shops on St Denis will sell the same crappy cargo shorts I wore in high school for like $50. I should save the unstylish stuff I wear now and sell it at an insane margin in the future. I'll run a racket, sneaking over the Vermont border with false-bottomed suitcases, the way they used to do with denim in the USSR.

7.11.2025

Inane observations aside (what's up with poutine? is it fries? is it gravy? what's the deal?) the most notable contrast is the relatively low collective stress level. Can't speak to their cholesterol; these people eat a lot of pork. Whole hog's heads on shelves even in random corner stores.

There's a real middle class here. Imagine! Workers work their union jobs and take vacations and have health care and some even own the property they live on.

Smaller differences are hard to see after six months. I've been absorbed. I don't really get lost anymore. Directional sensibilities realign I guess, even in a place where compasses don't work. Humans are crazy adaptable. The street cats don't give a shit which way North is.

On this cul-de-sac where I've been sleeping (indoors) there are maybe fifteen nationalities represented. Kids play soccer together in the street. A mirror universe not under constant threat of attack.

Montreal is proof that alternate realities exist, and not in some distant, goofy sci-fi setting but in North America just a few hops from our own clusterfucked metropolises. Sorry to leave, ready to return. Will all be more tangible in a few days I'm sure.

Home is home no matter how weird things get when we're away. But there's a lot of goddamn noise coming from America. A high pitched whine. Shrill, and dangerous. Omnidirectional sirens. I don't hear it here. The parks are full of people playing bocce and unconcerned about being shot. I intend to bring that peace with me and to hold onto it as long as I can. And to get to fuckin' work.

Merci toujours à Montréal.