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Above: Birthday selfie. I get handsomer every year. Today I turn forty. This date of 19 October 2016 has been waiting very patiently for me for some time and now it is here. Naturally I have important thoughts about achieving this great milestone. Below: A curtain call of some of my favorite friends, from whose pages I have mined many quotations over the years, to express my important thoughts for me.

Richardson, Vectors:

Say nothing as if it were news.

Porchia, Voices:

Quien dice la verdad, casi no dice nada. — He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

DFW, Infinite Jest, James O. Incandenza’s father speaking:

Learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what’s around you.

Annie, The Writing Life:

Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean or sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing.

Emily, #1563:

By homely gift and hindered Words

The human heart is told

Of Nothing — “Nothing” is the force

That renovates the World —

Will, Twelfth Night:

VIOLA I warrant thou art a merry fellow and car’st for nothing.

FESTE Not so, sir; I do care for something; but in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you. If that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible.

Strand, “The Monument”:

SONG OF MYSELF

First silence, then some humming,

then more silence, then nothing,

then more nothing, then silence,

then more silence, then nothing.

Happy 118th birthday to Henry Moore. Above: his uncannily accurate sculpture of Laura and me, entitled King and Queen, in honor of our tenth anniversary, which incidentally was two weeks and a day ago. I think we look pretty good after a decade of marriage, don’t you? Thank you for agreeing. — Pablo Neruda, last lines of the tenth poem from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in W.S. Merwin’s translation:

Siempre, siempre te alejas en las tardes

hacia donde el crepúsculo corre borrando estatuas.

 

Always, always you recede through the evenings

towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.

Vancouver Island postscript: Here is a majestic Vancouver Island orca that Laura and I are lucky enough to spot in the wild during our drive from Tofino back to Sidney at the end of the week. This orca may not measure up to last summer’s Newfoundland orcas, but it is certainly the best and most beautiful whale that we encounter on this trip. I am disqualifying the two subtle whale-spouts we see far out to sea on an earlier day, as they strike me as empty technicalities, and may have been mere tricks of the light. — As it happens, the phrase CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS contains all the letters in the word ORCA, so you can anagram the former and get some appealing lines involving the latter. Orca dances enact truth. The orca’s tundra accent. Orcas catch tender tuna. Tenured orcas can’t chat! — I must add that the best and most beautiful non-whale sea creatures that we encounter on this trip also begin with O.

Above: Land and sea and light and skies, Vancouver Island, last month. An embarrassment of landscapes with great wallops of weather. The earthquake and tsunami do not happen. The land holds still, and the sea stays where it is. — Not indicated above: The many hours Laura and I spend in book-reading/ocean-watching reveries in our Tofino hotel room, sometimes inside by the fireplace, sometimes bundled up out on the patio, the waves’ relentless ambient roar and crash slowly rewriting our brains’ instruction sets, the bracing seaward wind gusts rocking-and-rolling every craggy pine tree in sight. Also not indicated above: The many other hours Laura and I spend in food-inhaling/beer-downing reveries in tiny local restaurants, mostly away from the waves and the wind, though often after some easy low-impact outdoor walks in close proximity to both. Pablo Neruda has a line in The Book of Questions, in William O’Daly’s translation, that goes: Por qué me preguntan las olas / lo mismo que yo les pregunto? Why do the waves ask me / the same questions I ask them? — Very evocative. But Vancouver Island west coast waves say: I’m asking the questions here.

Vancouver Island! That sharp little splinter of Western Canada jabbing down into the U.S. at the forty-ninth parallel, interrupting that hilariously straight international border line just before it can hit the open Pacific unimpeded. I like that the city of Vancouver is not on Vancouver Island. The city is too cool to actually exist on the island it shares its name with and is dwarfed in size by. (Vancouver is visible in these NASA satellite photos as the top section of the brownish patch on the right edge of the image just below three o’clock.) Vancouver Island is not cool. It is a ferocious, rain-drenched tooth-and-claw-and-beak-filled forest wilderness of mountains, rivers, lakes, glaciers, cliffs, beaches, and tourists. Tomorrow Laura and I once again become two of those tourists. Last year’s excellent Newfoundland trip bestows upon us a decadent bounty of creatures of the sea, dramatic light, and chilled wet rocks, and this year we want more of those same things, only the West Coast versions. The creatures will be more relaxed, the light will be more fashionable, and the rocks will be grains of surf-beaten sand.

The once again a few sentences up is because this is our second visit to Vancouver Island. (Second and possibly final, as the coming Cascadia earthquake and tsunami will be leveling the place any minute now.) Laura and I first go there in 2007 and spend a week on the island’s west coast in Tofino and Ucluelet. Back then we are inexperienced travelers with uncultivated tastes, yet we still have a fine time. Now it is nine years later and we’re staying in Tofino again. Will we have a finer time? The landscapes will be the same, but how will we have changed? Besides our being nine years older and nine years awesomer and in far better shape and possessing somewhat deeper pockets. — Answer: We now hike a little more, read a little less, prefer fancy-pants beer to wine, and at all times carry glowing rectangles of perpetual distraction. Other answer: We have not changed nearly as much as we’d like to think and are still staggeringly inexperienced and uncultivated, as our vain, judgey, hifalutin older selves will no doubt decide nine years from now in 2025. (Unless the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami happen within the next seven days. In which case we, like everything west of Interstate 5, as the FEMA suit said, will be toast. Farewell.)

I am not, it grieves me to say, working from the Lovecraft anymore. Remember the Lovecraft? The Hamilton Public Library’s Central Branch’s generously-windowed and giant-ventilation-duct-tentacled fourth floor, that sanctum of productivity and concentration I resort to hiding out in during working hours last fall while the Hotel Fantod’s walls are exploding with machine noise? I’m no longer there. I had said it was my new office until further notice and this is the notice. I am a little late in giving this notice, as the Lovecraft stops being my office halfway through last November, when the Hotel Fantod construction work finally finishes up after its sixth week. I would likely have continued working from the Lovecraft anyway, but, by an absurdish coincidence, the week after our building’s construction ends, the Lovecraft itself closes for renovations. The crew of Lovecraft renovation goons shows up several days in advance and starts breaking things down while we poor library-haunting souls are still working there. At the time it’s unclear what’s happening. No closure announcements are in evidence. The goons just seal off half the fourth floor behind a wall of ceiling-suspended tarpaulins and spend a few days hammering and clanking and crashing around behind it. Then on a subsequent morning a goon emerges from behind the tarps brandishing a cordless power screwdriver, with which he begins loudly unbolting the legs from all the unoccupied study tables. ZZZWOCK. ZZZWOCK. ZZZWOCK. ZZZWOCK. CLANG. (Repeat three more times per table.) It strikes me as a bad sign. On my way out a few minutes later, I learn from a library employee that sure enough the fourth floor is slated shortly to be closed for obvious reasons. I marvel at my timing and then leave and go home and there’s no noise at home and somehow it has stayed that way.

Antonio Porchia, with W.S. Merwin’s translation: La tierra tiene lo que tú levantas de la tierra. Nada más tiene. — The earth has what you raise from the earth. It has nothing more.

Last month I spend a week in Florida bothering my parents. The January 2016 blizzard conveniently misses Ontario and I fly down while the storm is in its final stages of destroying the northeast. My ostensible purpose in staying at my parents’ place in Punta Gorda is to Help Around The House, but roughly half the time I’m there these petty and irrational states of mind overtake me and I get frustrated and pushy and punchy and short-fused, and instead of helping my parents I just bother them. It is no one’s fault but my own. After a few days of this, my parents’ house — the very house around which I’m failing to be of much help — has no choice but to step in and defend its owners. The house interprets my presence as an antagonistic, destabilizing, unwelcome foreign body and responds by flattening me with a Floridian stomach virus. Which successfully quiets me down.

It rains nonstop for three days during my visit. The National Weather Service has since declared January 2016 to be Punta Gorda’s rainiest January ever recorded, at 8.83 inches of rainfall. I listen to many of these inches thrumming on the roof of the guest bedroom while I lie in bed waiting to get better. I haven’t been sick in years and have forgotten the meaning of being sick but this right here is my crash refresher course and I am all caught up now. So there I am, no longer bothering my parents, but also in no shape to Help Around The House, and so really at this point I’m just in the way. (My parents do not catch the house’s virus. They and their Floridian stomachs are immune.) After a day I recover a little and attempt to be helpful a little but before my helpfulness can outweigh my bothersomeness it’s already the next day and it’s time for my flight home. In summation: This wash of a week was not my finest performance as a human being. Ways in which I was helpful: Changing light bulbs, carrying groceries, fixing computer things, and leaving.

Porchia again: Sólo algunos llegan a nada, porque el trayecto es largo. — Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.

Sweet mother of Infinite Loop. I finally own an iPod shuffle. A surprise gift from Hermano Dave, back in November. The tiny engraved cautionary note is of course in honor of the iPod shuffle poem, originally posted on erasing.org on 19 January 2005, eleven years ago today. Dave got hired by Apple last year, incidentally, so I can say that after all this time Apple kinda-sorta really did get around to sending me a free iPod. And not just an iPod shuffle, but literally a Do Not Eat iPod shuffle. As promised I have loaded the device with nothing but Glenn Gould. — Side note: I could not be more pleased with the way the juxtaposed DO NOT EAT text and bitten apple emblem inadvertently allude to the Fall of Man.

Xmas is over. The holidays are over. 2015 is over. All the New Year’s hoopla is over. Nevertheless here is a photo from December of our cheerful artificial Xmas tree decorated with tacky ornaments and dollar-store Xmas lights and synthetic garlands and a few miscellaneous personal tree ornaments that we find at the bottom of our Xmas-decoration boxes, all placed in our living room’s southwest corner such that the two perpendicular corner windows send back pleasing tree-extending Xmas-light reflections at night. It is a good holiday season. Mild weather. Low stress. Xmas shopping for the tiny-but-relentlessly-growing nieces and nephews is fairly painless. Laura and I re-record “Lait de Poule”, as the original is three years old and its age shows more than a bit. My re-sequenced version of the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas record rings out in our house on a daily basis. I bake molasses cookies and cast-iron-skillet cornbread, not on the same day, and both turn out unbelievably tasty. The calendar grants us a Friday Xmas Day and a Friday New Year’s Day and thus two consecutive long weekends with a lovely intervening four-day slack week. We see The Force Awakens (aka STAR WA) and find it to be an audacious and highly-engaging blend of attitude, fan service, screenplay craft, children’s-story narrative logic, breathtakingly expensive VFX, disarming self-referentiality, and big fat loud addictive movie-movie junk-food fun. I have a brief Twitter exchange with William Gibson regarding a certain cyberpunk cow cardigan that I may or may not commission for myself later in life. Laura and I enjoy our traditional homemade New Year’s Eve burritos, both on the night and the following day as leftovers while nursing the traditional January 1 champagne hangover. I and the flea-market ukulele perform an almost-on-pitch “Auld Lang Syne” in one of the Hotel Fantod’s beautifully reverberant stairwells. The critters under the Xmas tree are an Allegrian plush PuppyCat and a Beatonian plush Fat Pony and a duplicate Samantha the cat puppet whose original we gifted to a then-tiny niece a number of years ago. It is now 2016 and the weather is getting un-mild. I am writing this while listening to an intense high-wind Wintry Mix outside thumping and clattering against the windows. The Xmas tree is of course long gone, de-decorated and disassembled and packed up tightly in its cute green four-foot-long tote bag and stashed along with the Xmas-decoration boxes in our storage locker until next December. I was going to say I kind of wish I could stash myself in the locker till then as well, but that just sounds theatrical and silly and is not at all true. Too much good stuff will 100% happen this year. Why would I want to miss it?