Taylor Gray Moore

Limestone smacked by the sea

And criss crossed by holes

The sea rises up in like a question

I float in the water and gaze into

The Blight of Eleuthera 

Thinking of the endless waves and the sharks

That slip their way in from the deep Atlantic

And the red sand all across from Africa

There’s nothing to stop its ocean-wide thought

And the bats that flew away at the sound of me

At the mouth of that cave

The second day here

I went in with the Austrians and we threw that rock 

That only hit the bottom after sixty seconds

We gazed down the dark crevasse after it

And thought about following that stream to its end

But my shoes had holes in it and I left

And today I float in the sea water

And think about the holes and myself

Small here

A hole, most likely, in something 

Some sort of limestone,

Some kind of African sand

And I breathe out

Visited the Richmond Public Market today, with Cali—who is just recently back from a cross-continental train journey—on this the day the busses came back into service. It was my first time in there. Even after working a block away for five and a half years, I had managed to never go inside. It had become a sort of legend. 

Half of the shops on the first floor was shuttered, half or more, and we walked past this and a number of groceries stalls on our way to the stairs going up to the second level, which was lined with food dispensaries. We toured the choices, got lunch, and then sat down to talk publishing. We’ve both been trying to get published; we’re both looking into self pub this year. She’s putting out her book on punks in Vancouver very soon, and I’m looking forward to holding it in my hands. I’ve read this and that here and there, and I want to know the full flow of the thing. 

Another nine hour shift today, so not terribly exciting. Except for one thing: I heard back from Cactus about Cafe Noir Poems (I) today—they want it! I’m getting published again!

I will probably be more excited later once I’ve had time to process on a day when I am not working a nine hour shift. About that: story was empty again, I was miserably cold.

Anyway, the chapbook. Cafe Noir Poems. It’s part one of what was supposed to be a longer work. But that first part stands alone just fine, and I also decided I wanted to keep the rest of it more private for a while longer. It’s complicated. I’ll probably publish it someday. Maybe I’ll take the best parts of it and publish it as a part II sooner rather than later.

(Yes, I know that’s a laugh from me when I’m also doing this here project. “Privacy.” Haha.)

A week since my last entry. Well, that’s probably healthy. Not like I haven’t been working on this, though—for that week, most of which was taken up by 2-9:30 evening shifts, I was working on the Montreal content. Wake up, write, go to work, come home, write, go to sleep, wake up, write… etc. I got sick of it and needed to step away. Now I can take steps back again.

Since yesterday have started thinking about my short story collection as a whole work, too. It is absurd, oversized and pretentious. I want to put a quote from Journey to the End of Night in as an epigraph, and it is so long that I doubt anyone would consider publishing it as a debut work. On top of that, most of the stories don’t even make conventional sense. But it’s my work, the way I want it, and that makes me happy. 

What else did I do? I did do a couple other things.

Last night, went to Bimini’s for a friends birthday, last minute. I abandoned a lamb chop and a bottle of wine, because it was his birthday and I hadn’t seen him for ages. Getting there was a trial—I hate number seven bus, I hate it passionately, and no further comment—and the experience I had with the establishment itself was lukewarm figuratively and literally, but it was good to see Alex. We went to the Woodstove Festival in Cumberland together in 2022. We set up a little table on a street corner and sold my book, gave out free coffee. A wonderful experience, that. He once did an illustration to go with a poem I got published in an online journal. It will always be good to see Alex.

Today, the weather got truly miserable. It snowed a little bit in the morning, although it did not stick. The rest of the day was simply miserably cold. I was on till at work the first half of the day, and my exterminates went numb from being so close to the door. I had been going to have salad for lunch, but I caved and got Chinese BBQ on rice because I needed to eat something hot. The rain had mostly slowed by the time I finished, and was on my way to have dinner with Aby at Nuba in Kits. It was even pleasant, if chilly, to walk from the 99 stop at MacDonald to the restaurant at Balaclava. Food was fantastic; conversation was fantastic—I was a bit sleepy, especially at first (waking up at seven after a week of evening shifts that half force you to sleep in until nine is not fun), but I perked up with tea and lamb kebab in me. Always good to see Aby.

Got home, looked at narrowboats to rent, with grandpa. The two of us are going to England and going about the canals later this year. 

Now I’m here. It’s 11:30 and I’m too tired to be writing. I have said that before: this is often when I do end up getting this done. I’ve written it for the sake of writing it. A written word is never wasted.

I have mixed feelings about all the Montreal stuff I counterfeited over the last week—it was written so long after it happened, it isn’t real in the same way this is. I can sense the difference in timbre. But I had (have) the gut feeling that it was important to get it down when it was still fresh enough that it could be counterfeited at all. I’m proud of the work. Maybe I’ll do something more with it one day. Maybe if I go to Expozine another time and have a table, I’ll self-publish it as a book—sell people a book about Expozine at Expozine, how does that sound.

Ali Akbar Khan plays 

Raga Bhairav in 1973

And the plucked strings begin 

to densify as I chop tomatoes

For tabbouleh

And I drink flattening champagne 

On New Year’s day, 2024

The day never woke up 

The new year starts like this

But it strangely found this focus you see

Below is one more day from my online diary thingy, which I'm posting more regularly on my website (www.taylorgraymoore.com). If you like it, please take a look :D

I'm going to take a break from chronicling Montreal for now and try to catch up to the present, which is getting forgotten. And that forgets the whole point of the project. I need to wait to talk to someone about the next bit, anyway, and have time to chew on it. So, a break.

Anyway, here you go:

Today has been an eventful day, easily the most eventful of the trip so far: it’s nearly 4AM on the 6th now, and the day hasn’t ended. I just got back. I am well and drunk, and it’s far too late to write about any of this. Let me try again tomorrow, or later. Perhaps on the plane. I don’t know when the next time will be: this end of the trip is so compressed, and there is so much happening that these last days, as I look back at them (I’m back in Vancouver now, I couldn’t even finish this on the plane), and it feels like it should have been most of the trip. It was not—it was only the last 50 some-odd hours of a week long visit.

…

Almost everything after this point, this day and the next one at least, I finished after the fact. It got that busy. … So, the texture of the narrative will therefore be somewhat different—I don’t know how, but if I’m writing most of it in Vancouver who knows how long later, that will probably happen. It’s a memoir now, not a diary. Although I’ll still try to pretend—

Today is the day I promised to visit Tom in Lachine. Lachine is far—still technically Montreal proper, although this is only recently the case, but so far west it’s almost the airport, and, apart from passing through making my way to a plane, I have never been there. So I had to look up how to get there, and what time I had to leave if I wanted to get there, hang out a bit, and then get back out with reasonable time left in the evening. I have plans to get out to Verdun in the evening, you see—there’s somebody I want to see.

.I check this. I’ve checked it before, but I want to check again to be sure, and be more exact about it. Seems I’ll have to leave the apartment by 10:45—the earliest I’ve left to go anywhere so far—walk to the metro, get off at Lionel-Groulx and change to a bus. Not so complicated. But it’s a long trip, about an hour, and I always dislike unknown transfers, especially when the bus only comes every half an hour.

(It’s Friday, December 15th right now—the fourth day of waking up at 5am, and I’ve been editing this stuff at about 5pm every day this week, after coming home from the early shift I’ve been waking up at 5 for and settling in. It’s starting to get hard to do this, just from accumulated fatigue. And the texture of these texts is starting to turn into something more uncertain, less spontaneous. I’m less sure if I like it any more; I’m not sure if it’s still—and I HATE using this word but it’s the only one I know that gets the idea across—authentic to what it was meant to be. It’s starting to feel too much like fiction. I’m starting to worry too much about the plot, about scenes, about what I want to convey, and I’m going back and editing too much. I’m going to try to quit that a bit.)

I hadn’t seen Tom in… when was the last time I saw Tom? I don’t even remember. We weren’t so close, but I liked him. I was not always nice enough to him. It would be good to see him again. I had promised to see him before I knew he lived way out in Lachine, but that was fine—I like a good, long journey into the unknown. Fleshing out the map of the city a little. I’m a wanderer at heart, at least when I can do it by bus.

He offered to sell me back the copy of Animal Crossing that I sold him back in 2018, during the worst days at the end when I was selling everything off, mostly old games that I had never wanted to get rid of and wish I still had. (Oh, hey, that must’ve been the last time I’d seen him. Standing across from the old bathhouse at Bagg and St-Laurent waiting to meet him and exchange the game for, what was it, about thirty bucks? It was outside where, in the wee hours of the next morning, I would find that Matvey was saying. The world goes in these circles and places find their meaning that way). I said sure. I would be pleased to get it back—I’d give it to my mom, who had played it more than me. I wasn’t happy to sell a single one of those, and the idea of getting one of them, any of them, back is intensely cathartic. Like the quiet sort of emotional resolution you get at the end of a lot of quiet postmodern novels—a little bit of Earthly perfection.

I want to finish editing the last chapter of the novella before I go, and I do that easily—it’s only a couple of pages long, and I don’t have so many notes to copy out. Want to do that so much because I strongly suspect I will have no more time after I heard out the door that morning.

I have another time after I’m done to finish my coffee and get a 20 from the ATM in the dep directly below me, and then I’m off towards Mont-Royal metro through the snow that I’m already used to again. Enough has fallen and been packed now that I don’t slip so easily anymore. Make a quick phone call to home as I go up Rachel, then I turn onto St-Denis, thinking about how I had always wanted to spend more time on the street and how nice it feels to be walking along it now, and then I slip onto the metro and begin the journey proper. I zip underneath downtown and then out the other side.

Lionel-Groulx is a place I’ve never gone to much except to pass through. It’s where the bus from the airport lets you off, and where you catch it if you’re going out again. Sometimes I also got off here to go to the Super C by the Atwater Market, but that’s about it. I know there’s stuff around here, just the pattern of my life. I think I did go to a cafe near here once, just to have done it. But I associate it with comings and goings.

When I first arrived back after five years in exile, last May, I got out here. It has a power to it if only for that.

It’s one of my favourite stations design wise—looks pretty nice, I like the strange twisted tree sculpture with the faces, and it’s highly functional: an exchange station, the obvious transfers are made by just crossing the platform. Refreshing compared to all the walking in Berri-UQAM and not to mention the twisted labyrinth inside Jean-Talon. (I don’t know Snowdon enough to have an opinion.) Matt raves about it on his website: it’s truly excellent. … Let’s not talk too much about who its named after, other than to say he’s got a nice name.

There’s a bit of confusion when I surface from it, because the bus stop I need had been moved for… some reason that was not clarified. I cross Atwater towards a stop I at first think is what I want, only to find another closed stop. I turn around and see the bus appearing and about to turn towards what I realize is definitely the place I’m supposed to be. But the light changes, I bolt back across Atwater, and I join the line with plenty of time. I board. I sit. The bus pulls away and I water the world go by out the window as we follow the same path as that fabled bus to the airport until pulling out to go to Lachine.

Like I said, have never really been to Lachine. The airport bus passes along the top of it, although on the expressway so you don’t really see it, and I did get a better view on Uber ride once, which went along the streets of Lachine while trying to get me through the airport in time to catch a flight while the expressway was backed up with traffic.

The bus followed the same route as that Uber had for a short while, then turned onto Provost. I enjoy seeing previously unknown streets: it looks like how a lot of Montreal looks, but there are more single-floor detached homes. It’s a little like the South Shore, but not nearly that suburban. I watched a TV show filmed here once, and it looks enough like the East End for you to not notice it isn’t. But it is certainly more out of the way than where I’ve spent most of my time.

I get off at the stop Maps told me to get off at, and begin the trek through the snow to my end destination—one long Montreal block away. I pass a stop for the 90 St-Jacques, which is closer to where I’m going and also goes back to the metro. Maybe a better way to leave—and it goes through NDG, where there’s a bookstore I want to visit. Let’s look into that.

The address I’m headed for is the first building around the corner, when I turn. I walk up the steps and ring the apartment number I’d been given, get buzzed in.

Tom is as I remember him, more or less. Which isn’t a bad thing. We do the exchange for the game, he gets his twenty and the Animal Crossing goes into my bag, and then we sit and play some steam games. for an hour or two. It’s the most relaxed I’ve been in days. I do better than I thought I would, and I wish I did stuff like this more often. I note to myself I should see how many of these I can find on the Switch when I’m back in Van.

But then it’s time to go—we promise to add each other on switch, and I leave to catch that 90 St-Jacques bus. Which runs every fifteen minutes, not every half hour like the other one, apart from just plain being closer, and Tom agrees it’s the better way to go. I leave the building, turn the corner. The buss appears, passes me, pulls up to the stop. I break into a run, dunking under one or two tree branches without slowing down and praying I don’t slip. It sits there. I make it. I sit down to catch my breath—my lungs are still not exactly super happy, so I’m suffering a little—and see the useful digital sign telling me that I had five more minutes and so didn’t need to run.

It’s a more interesting bus route: the same way back along Provost, and then down 1re and Georges-V the way I came, but then instead of joining the Autoroute it instead goes under it and takes me through more that I’d never seen—through Ville St-Pierre and the bottom of Montreal West, along St-Jacques until I recognize Cavendish and here we are in familiar lands again. NDG: I spent a lot of time here, I was in a relationship with someone who lived here for years, and then I even lived here for a week at the very end of things. Even after I had come back to Montreal, it seemed like another thing entirely to go back to NDG, and I didn’t honestly expect to do it. But here I am—for the bookstore.

At Upper Lachine and Melrose I get off the bus. I walk up Melrose, through the tunnel under the tracks, and then continue until I eventually reach Sherbrooke West—which is exactly as I remember it. Why does it seem impossible that it still exists preserved? It should have collapsed like a false vacuum after I last passed by here on the 105. Like a fantasy world one wakes up from, like Koholint Island, gone.

But that’s silly; and nothing has changed. My favourite cafe there closed down during lockdown, but even that is the same on the outside—the sign is still up and everything, just the windows are papered over. I know this because I pass it on the bus when I leave, later, and I’m shocked to see that even that is the same. It must have been held suspended for me, so I could see it again and leave it properly, without fear and without distortion.

The reason why I’m here at all: Encore Books & Records. The third and last bookstore I’m going to to find the Okri book. … have they have it! I hadn’t even planned to come here. Must be fate. They have it, plus a couple of other books I want—Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, which I read shortly thereafter, and then I forget the other one—and a couple of records—Ville Emard Blues Band, plus a Christmas gift for someone—and I make myself glad that I brought a reusable tote back. I prolong my visit a bit longer, because I really did not expect to ever be back here. I take some pictures and send them to Mark, who would love it. Then—I really don’t want to be too late getting back—I head onwards. Walk out to the stop for the 105, wait a good ten minutes for it. Take the trip I remember so well back towards Vendome and the outside world, passing the shuttered Shaika and a past life as I go.

A version of myself died here in 2018. For years after, it really was hard to believe that my life had not somehow ended, that the life I was living in my present was in any way still my own. This bus ride reattaches that death to my continuing life. I don’t think that, then; that’s the artistry brought on by a later week’s reflection; when I disembark outside the totally reconstructed and unrecognizable Vendome, I’m only thinking of how hungry I am.

My (almost) daily scribbles have been continuing! But not here. My website is more functional, and they are being posted at https://taylorgraymoore.com/Scribbles/

The second half of the day was an attrition of small disappointments. Silly things, nothing that much worth commenting on. The quotidian sort of misery that you don’t even really notice, but which gets you down when you’re given something to contrast it with.

Okay, I’ll comment on it:

Public transit was extremely overcrowded. This was mildly annoying but basically alright, because I did manage to read standing and there was something kind of invigorating about it in the absence of any of the rest of it. I hadn’t gotten to work yet, it didn’t feel so bad; I managed to read, still. It was fine. 

A: Work was blah, but it was fine. It wears on a person after too many hours of it, and there are always too many hours of it. Even if you can get small happinesses out of it, there is too much general wear for them to compete. I won’t get into it—even you understand, or you don’t. I also tried starting to describe it several times, and then simply hit delete: I don’t really want to parse though it. Etc. Etc.

B: I forgot to get a zucchini while buying groceries up at Stong’s earlier. I like having zucchini for breakfast, and I was hoping to have some tomorrow. So I thought that I would go to PriceMart (supermarket at the same parking lot as work, I get my lunch there often enough) on one of my breaks and pick up one. I go there, can’t find a zucchini. So I go to customer service, ask to be shown where the zucchini is, and I find out they don’t have any zucchini. So I haven’t gone there for nothing, I buy some chicken breast, which I also need, and then stow in in the freezer at work.

C: Burrowing Owl has come in—this is a really nice Okanagan wine that only comes in once a year, at the beginning of December, in limited numbers. The price of the Merlot isn’t so bad, so I buy a bottle. It makes me a little happy—I’m a wine nerd, so sue me. I know I’ll lay it down and enjoy it in a few months, one of those small things, blah blah blah. I put it in a little brown paper bag with the receipt stapled on it and set it aside behind our customer service desk, per the rules we have going, and then resume my slow war of attrition. 

(Also, there was free pizza. There to celebrate us getting 100% from the mystery shopper twice in a row. Free food year, but that kind of stodgy stuff usually ends up making me feel miserable when I have too much—and I did have too much. Pizza is good, and it was butter chicken too.)

D: So, a few more hours of this and I’m feeling very blah, and I’ve remembered the SkyTrain is still closing early due to the new station they’re building and so, because this shift is so late, I will have to call an Uber to get home. Probably because I’m so focused on this fact, which is not especially pleasant—although, talking to two of my co-workers outside the door while I’m waiting for said ride and they’re having cigarettes before departing, it’s not so awful to get to skip a long transit ride—I forget the wine and the chicken. I remember the wine as I’m in the Uber zipping past the airport, and it’s more intensely depressing than is probably reasonable. Wine is intensely symbolic to me, and I was looking forward to putting it away when I got home. The fact that I know I’m being silly somehow makes this worse. Then I also remember the chicken.

Damn it. Damn it. God damn it. 

Now I’m sitting here writing, to sort of put it in perspective for myself. Or at least make something out of it. I’ll finish this and then go read. 

Well, I’m back in Vancouver—

Sorry for the extreme lack of posting over the last bit of the trip. I got super busy there, which is what Montreal is for—and I wrote this and that, without finishing much. I’ll figure out what to do with that over the coming week or so.

Time for move on, in the next bit, anyway. Figure out what to do next and how to work it. My schedule is hilariously bad: I am working from 4 to 11:30 today and tomorrow, then I have some time off, then I go back and work a week of 7-230 shifts. If the travel and the jet lag didn’t wreck me, that will.

So it goes.

Slept in a little this morning, at least. Woke up and had a Wilensky sandwich, then got a massive volume of groceries to fill the empty fridge. Then I got back, unpacked, and now I’m up writing this. Kind of a bland entry, but social media presence means being present—so, hi.

What’s happening next? Well, I want to work on the website so it’s actually sorta functional as a website. Evan sent me some good advice, and I’ll revisit that. Also, want to finish fleshing out the stuff I wrote about the trip while I was on it, including all the handwritten stuff and the notes on my phone. I’ll be posting choice fragments of this, and also it’s such a huge volume of text that I might choose to do something more with it. Non-fiction novella or something. Memoir. I’ve never done non-fiction before, so the idea is a little strange and I’m unsure how to approach it, but why not?

Also need to finish those last two short stories. Get that collection nice and tidy and ready to send to Willow. Then get moving on self-pub for Vancouver Observed. A few balls I want to get rolling. 

Finish studying for my driving test, too.

Stopping a moment before

Going somewhere I promised to go

(Somewhere productive, or something like that)

In a cafe I’ve passed before on Rachel 

To have a quick coffee

And to write a quick poem

Give this end of the day some space,

Give the whole day some space,

For it has been speeding along

Though the ice and snow and hours

And carrying me along with it

The only cure for that 

Is coffee in turquoise cup

In a warm cafe

From where I can look out

At the frost on the windows

And the dimming Montreal light

For a few minutes

Before I pick myself up again.

This is my Mile End day. Took the bus up St-Laurent—because no, thank thank you very much, but I am not trudging up the Main on foot in this weather—and got off at Bernard. Trudged over to the big empty lot where I set a story to take pictures and send them on to the guy who’s reading it, for reference. Also for my own satisfaction, because I always like seeing the Big Empty Lot—one of my earliest memories of Montreal (the night I met Shawn, Sean & Anae), includes it, and one of my last memories (that short story I mentioned), both involve it. In the years when I was in proper exile, it was one of the places I dreamed of standing in again, desolate as it is. So, there I was; pictures: snap snap snap.

Went to Drawn & Quarterly. Spent too much money there. It’s an independent bookstore, so therefore a good cause. And I will always spend too much money on books.

Addition, because, as someone pointed out, I don’t describe where I am at all:

Expozine is a massive zine and small press fair held in Montreal every year. I went to one once nearly ten years ago, in 2014, when it was held in the basement of the church at Laurier and St-Laurent—I forget the name. They seem to like holding it in churches, because it’s in a church again this year. St-Arsene. The name reminds me of Arsene Lupin.

 Vast space, billowing around us all: you come in from the snow (by Sunday, there was snow), shake yourself dry as you can in a sort of vestibule, and then pass the “bar” into that main space. Rows and rows of tables, lined with books and indie artwork. It has quite an energy. So much creation, all together in one place. 

I was shameless, and handed cards out everywhere.

One of the organizers, when I talked to him, complained that it wasn't enough space. They had to fight to even use the stage. 

Note: this is a day old. 

I am at expozine—in the “bar” area, eating samosas and having earl grey. Because, so festooned with books, I need a break. I am getting less exposure than I expected and I am making no money, but I am indeed glad to be here and share in this energy. See old friends. Etc. Exist; participate. Remember it later. …and, hopefully, people will read my stuff. (Hey, it is in fact for sale—just not by me. The publisher is here. I’ve just been informed—I’ll be back to the table later.)

Woke up early to try to fight off jetlag, although (this is also part of jet lag) I couldn’t get to sleep well last night. I watched a short film about an interracial couple in Tel Aviv and then tried again. Eventually fell asleep. 

And in the morning I laid in, listened to the traffic blaring on St-Laurent through my earplugs, then forced myself up. I made me a pot of coffee in the provided coffee maker, with the provided grounds. I made breakfast, with my groceries from Segal’s, figuring out the stuff they provide for me to do so as I went—they have a dishwasher! I just noticed. I’ve never had a dishwasher before, how exciting! And then I sat down to pound out the half-drunk notes from the other night, put them into a post-able, at least semi-coherent form. Then, after so many endless cups of coffee, I went out into the light snow. 

The zine fest is up around Belanger and Cristoph-Colomb, the upper edge of Le Petite Patrie that I always liked but never spent a lot of time in, in a church. There’s also a jewelry fair set up in another room, which is mostly empty. The zine fest is hopping. 

Well, I didn’t go to Avenue du Mont Royal. I felt like I was fading, as I finished dinner, and thought it was best to stick to close by where I was staying. This was one of these fateful decisions, or at least it was what shaped the night.

I started to walk back towards the AirBnb. Via Duluth, which has always been a favourite street to me—I thought I would go along it and then just end up back close to where I would fall to sleep. I had been meaning to stop at some place I’d passed on St-Laurent earlier, when I’d been dragging my bags up it, have a couple of beers and then go up to bed. But a couple blocks short of the Main, still on Duluth, I saw a second-floor-bar up inside on the building across the street. I stopped—because I was my first night in Montreal, so why pass by a fleeting inspiration? It won’t be this second ever again. So, across Duluth and up the stairs I went. Unlike the jazz place, there was still room. I got a seat at the bar, next to someone going over the draft of a story in French while sipping a wine. I got out the white sheets of my own draft, ordered a beer and set to get a head start on that project.

Got to the third page of what I’d brought to work on, while I was there. More than I expected to get done that first night, which was nothing. It got harder to work on it after I was done my second drink, but I was still more than satisfied. I sent my friend Matvey, who lives nearby in Vermont, a picture of the bar out of happiness, because we used to go to places like this. 

Hey! Turns out Bar Suzanne (that’s the name of the place) is also Matvey’s latest favourite spot in town. Small world. He was quite happy when I sent him the picture, and he recommended I try the dumplings. I had already eaten, but what the hey, I’m in Montreal, so I tried them. They were good. 

All this sounds silly and superficial, I know. but these things are draped in the emotions of a past. You have no idea what Montreal in general is draped in, for me. Everything in this city, down to the dust motes, is draped in all that for me. So I get a lot out of it past that layer I can put into words in a space like this.

I took his advice there and on where to go next—Big in Japan Bar, which is directly underneath where I’m staying—when I wasn’t even planning to go anywhere. This ended up shaping the entire night.

Big in Japan Bar looms large in memory. Nothing here is important but memory. I only when there once then, back in the Montreal phase of my life, but it does loom large. It’s important, is what I mean. Matvey showed it to me, that first and only time. How well do I remember it? I think he brought me there early one evening after we’d been on a long walk. The place would’ve had to have just opened that day. Matvey said you’d have to be early to avoid waiting in line outside. I listen to Charles Aznavour as I write this and something is thereby infused in it. La Boheme, if it matters, it is late and I am drunk. 

Excuse the quality of this entry, because I wrote it drunk—even though I’m fixing it two days later, that is the context I found it in.

There wasn’t any line when I waltzed in this time: that might’ve been luck or it might’ve just been the eight years in between. That time, we sat down in the same seats I took this time. Or, roughly—but let me have the synchronicity. 

Why is memory already so fragmentary? I want to remember details, but I have nothing I can call a narrative. I have flashes. I have snapshots. 

But tonight: I order a champagne and the plate of artisanal chocolates, per Matvey’s recommendation, because he steers one in a good direction if you can handle the price tag. I finish that, get an impulsive martini, because the ingredient list is so odd (it has sake in it). It, unfortunately, just tastes like a martini. Something exotic on the nose, but still a martini. I would’ve left after that, except, as I was finishing it, the woman seated just across from me asked me what it was I was so intensely focused on. 

I had had my nose in my notebook. Over the two drinks, I’d written a couple of little poems and the first notes of what became this entry you’re now reading. I tell her that. And we end up talking. 

Justin and Diane: they were my company for the rest of the night. Sitting across from me, the two people other side of the flickering candlelight. The room fades to darkness as it passes behind them. I really had noticed them before—Justin was having beer, and seeing him have that made me aware of how much money I was spending on champagne and cocktails—but it hadn’t occurred to me that I might interact with them. I’m used to being an atom; it doesn’t occur to me that I’ll occur with anyone. 

We all—the two other people nearby, over my right shoulder, eventually get roped in—start talking. The conversation is good. Since it’s clear I’m staying for longer now, I order a Manhattan, the other retro-classy choice, the sound of Otis Redding and an electric organ. Diane goes to Vancouver often, and likes the food there, and we talk about sushi on Robson St to the sound of Charles Aznavour—that is why he’s still in my life as I copy this out. She asks for recommendations and I give her some, off the top of my head. Because it is identical to the one she’s drinking from and because I’m distracting her, she picks up the candle’s glass and burns her hand. She flexes her hand against the heat in it and reaches for the glass with the other kind of flame, the one she can drink. 

Justin hands me a two-panel dubble-dubble comic that has been ripped in two. He says the bartender gave it to him, and he asks me to explain it to him. It’s “Pud.” I remember “Pud.” Let’s see if I can remember the comic: first panel has our Pud filling a bubble bath, and he says he wants more bubbles. The next panel shows the outside of a house and bubbles are pouring out all the doors and windows. I had the two halves back to Justin and explain the joke is that he fills the bath too much and it consumes the whole house. It’s not really much of a joke, but I don’t say that. Diana suggests that it’s a pun on the name of the gum: double bubbles.

Haha. Ahaha ha. Ha. It’s a better joke than the comic could’ve come up with. 

The music in that place is very good. Half of any place like that is the music. While I’m taking a moment of silence listening to that, the other two I mentioned are roped in properly. Zach and Brian. They ask for a poem, I wrote one. Here it is:

Brian and Zach

Eavesdropping

Got roped into the night

And we introduced each other

Humanity accumulates this way,

It forms clumps of event

And grows like that

And the night endures as an imprint

In ink of itself

And reclines in immortality there

Like the chipped and fading youth

Who live on the side of an excavated urn. 

There it is, with very minor edits. Forgive me if it isn’t any good, I was several more drinks in by this point. 

Everything past that point is going to be in flashes and fragments. It’s already a memory to me now, see, and I only have these notes in front of me to work with to build the narrative of it back up. You never do realize how fleeting a present moment is while it’s still the present, but it does hit you over the head when you’re trying to copy it all out in black and white like you were still there.

I asked Justin what it was like being a lawyer: he said that sometimes you feel like you’re fighting for something meaningful, fighting the good fight as they say, and that is the part that makes it worth it, and things click then; the other half of the time it feels like fighting for nothing. Like everything in the world, those two halves. I know those halves too. I tell him so. 

The night is vanishing into smoke, like the day Charles G.D. Roberts wrote about that one old poem I forget the name of that I read that McGill once. Night is the day here. The whole world is smoke except for what we put into words and maybe even that. (See how drunk I am, scribbling this down? Or was—it’s really two days later, I’m recalling the smoke as best I can—but don’t think about that.) 

What do you see when you blink?

This is a blink. All this is inside a blink. Tomorrow this will have been a blink, but look at all the population in it. 

Diana asks for my impression of the two of them. I am on the spot, but I tell them. I am unusually honest, blame the drink, but I have nothing bad to say. I like Justin and Diane. I’ll keep my exact words between the three of us, because it was for them and not for all of you--but I said, more or less, that I thought they were honest and human. 

Excuse me, for I am drunk.

The place is emptying out around us, and we’re still here. Never let anyone tell you that isn’t a good feeling, having the bar empty out around you as your night endures: we’re going to get to see if we outlive the candles.

The chanson continues; therefore life continues.

(There is an absurd amount of ice in the urinals here. They’re like American glasses of coca-cola.)

We all settle up, and our bills all come to the exact same amount. The bartender gets roped into conversation too, at this last moment. I think I may have given him one of my cards. He writes his name down on a napkin, as I put my coat on, because he’s the last person there whose name I don’t know. “Majd”—it means ‘Glory,’ he tells me. The three of us who’ve just paid up blow out the candles in front of us. I pick up the glass around the dead flame, hold it like something is in there. 

I am in Montreal!

Sitting in a place on St-Denis called Mr. Cajun, because the jazz bar just down that I had wanted to go to was all full. Seemed divine, but was full. Oh well—this place smells pretty great. No complaints. Writing this while waiting for shrimp and chicken on rice and a ginger ale.

I did not sleep well, but that’s my fault (I stayed up ticketing with the website and then playing Zelda), and I slept enough (if you can call five hours enough). Flight was good: watched the Barbie movie and read another few chapters on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Did not fall asleep, which shocked me. Had a nice conversation with the woman next to me, who was on her way to Halifax for a birthday and appreciated that I was watching Barbie. She recommended I watch Gerwing’s Little Women—and, since I liked Barbie quite a bit and I’ve otherwise heard good things, I’ll get it from RJ when I get back.

Got my bag. Smooth uber ride from airport. I accidentally copied down the wrong address, so was dropped off at a parking lot outside a Pharmaprix. This was sorted, and I went with my luggage two blocks up to the actual location at the corner of Rachel and St-Laurent, overtop Petati Peteta and Big in Japan Bar, and looking out over the setting of one of my short stories. Floating: the bar who appeared and disappeared. I feel these ghosts of myself whenever I’m in this city.

Antsy on this last day before flying out, I am down at a cafe (Perchance, just at Dunbar and 18th, a block away from me) in a table in a corner, watching the space become increasingly crowded as those children just leaving school begin to pile in. I don’t see myself staying long.

I have developed a tender relationship with cafes over the years. It’s where I started coming to write back when I was about twenty and first going out and exploring the city around me, walking random parts of it and setting myself up where I found myself wanting to sit for awhile. Mostly cafes; sometimes restaurants. Often enough, restaurants. The cafe became the centre of the experience when I went to Montreal. I remember seeing an article in the Journal de Montreal posted in my own local cafe, listing the best cafes at every metro station. I was one year in town, and off for the summer. I decided to explore the city by following that list. I did explore the city, and the idea of the cafe was absorbed into my soul. 

For years, I could only get writing done if I went to a cafe. When I went out on a day off, the reason was usually to go to a cafe. Even if I went across town, it was to go to a cafe. I have nothing but good things to say about the cafes of Commercial Dr, of Gastown, of Main St. I spent many happy and productive hours in them, and then happily boarded busses home. 

I don’t go to cafes so much anymore. Things changed when the lockdown happened; couldn’t go out anymore, so I set up an office it the attic. It ended up working for me better. Now I go here sometimes, usually for take out, sometimes down to Grounds for Coffee if I want to sit down. I don’t go out further much. If I do, I tend to go to a restaurant—I have the money to spend. 

This place is filling up and I’ve had too much coffee. I’ll be headed out soon.

Done most of my packing, save for my changers and a few clothes. Most of the evening will be trying to relax. Going to make pasta—scallops and mushrooms in a cream sauce, and I bought I nice bottle of Sicilian white wine to have with it. I’m looking forward. If my writing seemed choppy, it’s because there’s a dad with two kids hovering over me and obviously waiting for me to give up my table. I’ll finish this later if I finish it at all.

No, they’re gone. Ah, but I’ve still had too much coffee. I ought to have bought a tea, which was my first plan. Ah well. Hopefully it at least won’t keep me awake.