Booked a hotel through Expedia a few weeks ago. A random, last-minute hotel, close to the place I’d be working that week. The LiA. Fancy name. Photos on Expedia looked OK to me. I’d be fine at the LiA. (more…)
I despise summer on the East Coast. I always have. The Herald Square subway station at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue is the real-world equivalent of the hubs of hell. It’s the epicenter of NYC’s savage summer heat. It’s claustrophobic and dark down there. It reeks of spoiled garbage and urine. You’re a hundred feet below ground, surrounded by trash and darkness, yet the temperature is still as warm as a witch’s oven. Even the track rats seem to openly sweat in the Herald Square station. (more…)
[This is a continuation of my account of my first days in Vancouver in May 2009. I think there’s one, maybe two parts left. Oh, and hey! Thanks for reading. I haven’t been posting consistently lately, which you may have noticed. Planning to post more in the coming days. Hope you come back. -Scott.] As soon as I stepped off the plane in Vancouver, as soon as I set foot in the airport, I left some of the nagging 9/11 gloom behind. My shoulders, it seemed, were relieved of an invisible burden on this arrival. My posture began to automatically self-correct….
I had a pretty serious girlfriend in New York. Her name was Jill. I was nuts about her. Jill was a part-time teacher in the math department at NYU. She lived in New York but she was from Vancouver—the same city, coincidentally, where I was shooting a TV show every month or two. She’d grown up in Vancouver in the 70’s and 80’s. She’d been a snowboarding prodigy as a kid, which sounded terribly Canadian to me. She remembered her dad driving her down the icy mountain roads after her snowboarding meets. Her father always bought her a tuna sub…
Canada. It’s the wild, sprawling, underpopulated, metric system-loving Garden of Eden to America’s north. If you’re American, as I am, and you’re looking to dodge a draft, or escape the law after robbing a bank, or see a loon, Canada’s got your back on all three fronts. (more…)
Vancouver, British Columbia. Saturday morning in September 2016. Low clouds. No rain yet, but it’s coming. Cloud cover so low and dark this morning that the city feels boxed in and claustrophobic. As soon as I step out the front door of my building, rain begins to fall, raindrops as big as Canadian nickels. I fish the umbrella out of my backpack and press the button on the handle. FWAP! The unfolding nylon sounds like an oversized bat taking flight. The rain is merciless and cruel. It threatens to shred my umbrella, to reduce it to a nylon pulp. It’s pounding everything, myself included, down, down,…
This girl I liked wanted to tell me about an encounter she once had with a B-level celebrity. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was in line at the airport in Montreal and Celebrity X was in front of me?” she asked. (It was Russell Brand. It’s always Russell Brand. Everyone I know has been in line in an airport behind Russell Brand at some point.) “No, you didn’t tell me that one…” I said, wincing. “Well, it’s an incredible story,” the girl said. She rubbed her hands together excitedly, in anticipation of her own story. Then she…
My father and mother arrived on Sunday to drop off the paper at the hospital. My father was obviously excited. “I found a place that sells it for $6 instead of $10,” he said with pride. The $10 Canadian price of the NY Times vexed and mystified him on a very deep level. I knew the place where he’d gotten such a discount: the dimly lit convenience mart on Davie Street that had about a hundred hookahs in the front window, all decorated with dazzling sprays of rhinestones. I told him the store had been closed the year before for selling black market handguns. “Who cares if they sell monkey…
Hello, site visitor! My, you are one tenacious individual. Thank you for your interest, your commitment, and your passion. I finally have an update for you. But the news, unfortunately, isn’t necessarily good…. The future of this site is currently uncertain. I don’t know how necessary it is for me to leave it here, without regular updates, which I am obviously not writing right now. I can’t remember why I thought this site was a good idea in the first place. I guess I was hoping to catalogue my thoughts in the hopes of one day selling a book. All…
I recently had to collect a stray package from the UPS store. I headed for the West End, where the yellow note that UPS had left on my front door directed me to go. It was a balmy weekday afternoon. Strong sunshine, but not too strong. Canadians like to stroll on summer afternoons. They seem to have no destination or purpose. They don’t walk, per se; more accurately, they drift. They pause at random moments. They gaze up at trees as if they’ve never seen trees before. I know West Coast Canadians now. They’re lovely, but most have static in their heads, like TV’s without signals. Or they’re…
