Boxing is our most controversial American sport, always, it seems, on the brink of being abolished. Its detractors speak of it in contempt as a "so-called 'sport,'" and surely their logic is correct: if "sport" means harmless play, boxing is not a sport; it is certainly not a game. But "sport" can signify a paradigm of life, a reduction of its complexities in terms of a single symbolic action--in this case its competitiveness, the cruelty of its Darwinian enterprise--defined and restrained by any number of rules, regulations, and customs: in which case boxing is probably, as the ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman has said, the sport to which all other sports aspire. It is the quintessential image of human struggle, masculine or otherwise, against not only other people but one's own divided self. 
-- Joyce Carol Oates

Someday, they're gonna write a blues song just for fighters. It'll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.
-- Sonny Liston

As a child somewhere on the journey towards adolescence in the mid-to-late 1980s, there were certain names that brought with them entire worlds. "Maradona" was one this little Canadian Scot spent a lot of time rolling around his tongue, while balls rolled around football pitches marked out by jumpers and trees, at the feet of players far more capable than he. "Schwarzenegger" and "Stallone" made for air machine guns, bandannas, throwing each other in the mud and learning to love the art of gratuitious bloodshed.

Then there was Tyson. Tyson was what the older kids who worked at the slaughterhouse would name their dogs (and, eventually, their children). Tyson was huddled conversations under the bridge about sixty second knockouts, older cousins with cigarettes in their mouths, replaying the fist swings with a slow and sincere reverence. Tyson was in the playground, our heads smashed against walls by the bulkier and more slowly moving amongst us, games of British Bulldogs suddenly turning to the heavyweight championship for inspiration. Seconds out, they'd shout, and the bricks were only ever those seconds away.

At the time, Joyce Carol Oates was writing very smart and eventually legendary work on Tyson, contextualising him amongst the greats. But the rumble in the jungle, to us, was probably an episode of GI Joe. We were becoming vaguely aware that Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali were the same person but could not tell you the reasons why. Frank Bruno was on the Saturday telly, that lovely Irish McGuigan lad too. But those weren't the word that made the world shake.

That word was Tyson.

I knew nothing of boxing, but I knew what I saw. That vicious, raw, pure distillation of the fight. Kid Dynamite transformed into Iron Mike. The purists hated him. He wasn't the art. The world did not dance on his fists. It was pummelled. He was unbeatable because you can't beat rage like that. You can't beat the streets, and the prisons, and the anger.

You know what happened. Others have written it better. Those who actually know something about boxing. Start with David Remnick and go on from there. There was the rape. The prison sentence. The comeback. Evander Holyfield. The ear bite. Fuck you til you love me, faggot. Don King. The collapse. Dragging boxing down with him.

And always, at the center, that man, that strange, self-victimising madman with the motor mouth. With his mansions abandoned, he is reduced to that hoariest of cliches, the fallen heavyweight champ. The Raging Bull. The Sonny Liston. Long ago a realisation there would be no triumphant Balboa return, horns ablaze. This was it.

"Not entirely trusting this page to remain attached, I shall write nothing of consequence on it."

Trawling through eight months and six continents worth of notebook. Words written on the top of Austrian mountains; in Quebec hotel rooms where founding members of Godspeed offer clean towels while New York free jazz troupes rehearse outside my door; in Tangier where a cafe owner tells me of his previous life as a tenor saxophonist touring the provinces of Britain, and young hustlers train their kid brothers in the art of the graft. There are directions to the flat in Buenos Aires of two marvellous people in love, no longer together. Take the blue line to Plaza de Miserere. There are shopping lists for beans, cat food, soy milk and Jesse Ball's new book (eventually found in a Shakespeare & Co in Vienna, where I was actually looking for a guidebook for Venice but the only one they had was Venice: A City for Lovers, which did not seem appropriate for my mood). There are notes for a play. That'll happen. Somebody's paying me. It's about war.

There's a note that I want to buy the replica FIFA 1954 World Cup referee's jumper from the shop in Singapore Airport (it wasn't there on the return flight). Directions to barbecue pits in Texas. Notes frantically scribbled at a David Mamet lecture at UT and further lines from Ricky Jay's minor character in The Unit ("you're alive." / "a fault I share with all but the dead").

The words "DMX ('penis be out')", which can only mean in some hotel I'd been watching MTV news (though this story seems to be from much earlier in 2008, earlier than I'd even owned this notebook, perhaps DMX was just on my mind). Then there is a fragment of a conversation from a Canadian uncle, "the strange thing is that he likes the ocean". Followed by notes on fisheries strikes, my grandfather's fingers, and the legacy of Joey Smallwood. In a cafe, somewhere in Canada by the page number, a dreadlocked guy at the next table frantically searching for information about David Icke as the scion of John D Rockefeller Jr.

Thoughts on illness. On hospitals. On love and the ways it breaks. On freezing hands at the edge of the Mall in DC on January 20, "I was there" moments caught mostly in sound bouncing back off the buildings. I will tell my grandchildren, when they ask, about looking up the speech on the internet later, and agreeing that it was quite something.

Notes from the Venice Biennale, futile attempts to try to capture thoughts on so much art in so little time. Ends up just being the names of artists. Maybe I can google Pavel Pepperstein later and re-feel whatever that thing is that strikes you the first time around.

Addresses for gigs. For bars. For friends. For bands. Hotels and train times to get me from one pocket of not-home to another. Other than the odd photograph, the only evidence of what the hell I've been doing.

I thought I'd lost my notebook the other day. I'd left it on the floor of a client's half-height office after writing down a wireless key.

Realised I'd better start writing some stuff down. Now that I'm home.

[1]. Today I am 27 years old on the 27^th day of the month. 27; the number of current amendments to the US Constitution, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the age at which Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Alain-Fournier died. There are 27 bones in the human hand and 27 member states in the European Union. I was born when my father was 27 years old which makes this the only remaining year when his age will be exactly double mine (unless he lives to be 108). When Dad was 27 the Falklands War was just beginning, he was working as an electrician installing emergency lights into the stairwells of skyscrapers in London, and he listened to Dire Straits on Capital FM. At age 27 today’s news covered the outbreak of Swine Influenza in Mexico, the United States and New Zealand, I am still studying for my PhD and I listen to the music that I’ve most recently downloaded.

I have been feeling a bit apprehensive about this birthday. All birthday celebrations have something of the apotropaic about them, a mealy cake offered to the hungry world as bargain for the birthday-ee’s continued safety and luck, but this 27^th seems particularly charged. A distinct geometric motif speaks to the feeling - that this is a hinge year. A corner is coming up fast and I’ve no idea if the momentum means to push me nose-first into a hard plane, or turn me out into some new landscape. The edginess of things.     

[2]. I am living in Perth, in the house on a steep hill that belongs to my parents. The incline makes it difficult to get out of a car. Postmen weave up the centre of the road throwing handfuls of mail in the vicinity of the houses because if they stop, their bikes roll backwards and topple. The plants I grow slip two inches down the hill every year, peeling back fresh garden-bed at the top of the block in Spring. I had intended to move out on returning from Holland last year, but with my PhD thesis due in December and no sensible share-house room becoming available I have negotiated a compassionate rate of board to stay here until the end of the year. I have partially converted the upstairs bedroom that used to belong to LG into a kind of study space and I am sleeping in the basement. During the day I work with an eye cast to the garden and the blind collie we keep, who walks into walls and fights ghost-cats. I talk to her through the open window and she flicks her brow the way dogs do, searching for the hand that matches the voice. Her sense of audible distance is impaired now too.

In some ways this the ideal work environment - insulated and isolated. In other ways, it is a lonely place. The dog doesn’t like to be inside anymore and usually there are no other people walking along the suburban street during the day. Routines establish, decay and re-establish. A month ago a dry windstorm came down the coast during a green-waste collection, when all the heavy litter was laid on the verges. I was trying to hose the front lawn (useless, backwards water-flowers) when a child’s playhouse, what used to be called a Wendy House, came hurtling down the street as if it were on coasters. It crashed into a electricity pole near the bottom of the hill in a spectacular chrysanthemum of splinters. But no one else was there to see it with me, except the unseeing dog. All night the stumbling of air currents, the wind with its feet stuck in its trousers. These are the sorts of days I like here. Today is a bright still day, the sky a colour only nature has language for. Clouds come in like rays in the evening. Last year the weather was colder. 

A little preemptive announcement as the site is still in disrepair,
but re-bookmark me please.

I am natalija.com.au

x

Yes, I know, (everyone I cross paths with asks) Obama has chosen a Portuguese Water Dog for the Whitehouse.
Oscar's identity can no longer be elusive. Now every man, woman and dog will want one and his name will be as common as mud. Judging by the popularity of Obama, I don't doubt that we'll soon be seeing Water Dog emblazoned cups, ties and ranges of snacks that both you and your dog can share.

It's disappointing, not just to me, but to Oscar. You know, he felt special, like a real individual. The attention he received on simple walks to the beach truly put an extra bounce in his stride. It's what he's grown up with and now he risks being... common.

It's also like being the first 'of' something cool, then someone 'famous' goes and copies you, and no one realises that you were the original.

So I thought it would only be fair to Oscar, to share with the world that Obama actually googled "gorgeous beach loving dogs" and discovered my blog. He enjoyed reading Oscar's adventures so much that, well, the choice was easy. But he didn't even contact me to tell me of this inspiration.
What do you expect really, as if he could tell the world that he'd copied someone else. That wouldn't be very presidential...

Oscar has taken it all a bit personally, and is exercising his cool factor, a bit hard.
I'm letting him do it, I'm sure it's just a phase, a necessary process.

Although I kinda want my sunnies and hammock back.

[current mood] Ginger Cod & Top 100 80's hits

Finally the most significant day of the year has been recognised.

This and the Facebook events calendar should see me through...

[current mood] Organic Red Wine & New Email Beep

Contemplating my highly reactive state I thought that perhaps I could be likened to a highly reactive element, like Francium or Cesium. I've previously described myself as porous, like one of those house sponges that just drinks up whatever it lays in. That's fairly accurate. But now I'm liking the picture of me as a gas. Little molecules floating around in a pink haze - pretty vibey, pretty fast moving... but at high risk of contamination.
Sometimes a good result, sometimes a bad one, but always REACTIVE.

Here are some chemical equations I have worked out.

I am (in my Eckhart Tollesque way) working on not reacting. I am working my way back up the chart, and over to the right. I'd feel pretty comfortable if I settled on Carbon. Plain old simple, low reaction Carbon.

Eventually I might become a diamond.

[current mood] Beach Runs & Death Cab

But it is scary too.... so I think I'll hide up the back and gauge the audience reaction before doing any further promotion. Stay tuned (or turn up!)

Starring Damon Lockwood and Terry Hackett. It's a satirical film about Derwent, his mother and their sticky dreams.

[current mood] Israeli Couscous & Ladyhawke

They call it the magic hour
Just before sunset when the light turns
and the flowers vibrate
And everything is settling in for the night

[current mood] Peppermint Tea & Dusty Springfield's Spooky

Conversation as follows:

"Hi there, I'm just wondering if you have any of those smudge sticks - the kind you burn. Like herbs.."

"No, we don't believe in that."

"Huh. Believe in what?"

"That's spiritual stuff."

"Well, no, it's herbs that you burn."

"But for what purpose?"

"Cleansing"

"Cleansing what?"

"Energy... in a room...."

"No, we don't believe in that. Just pray to the holy spirit"

"Ok then, bye"

Needless to say I am a little perplexed as I would have thought that a herbal shop would believe in herbal qualities - like purification of air. It's just what 'take' you have on it I suppose. But who would deny that some sage and juniper would freshen up a room, (and yes, killing off old energy left by previous occupants). Just not sure if the holy spirit is going to help me out here...

[current mood] Bananas & Yoga Songs

With every flight I think that my fear can't get any worse. I often promise the god of the air that if he just lets me land safe then I'll never step on another plane. I'll boat, I'll bike, I'll bloody walk, just land me this one time.

When I'm up there above the globe, staring at the wings functioning correctly, I reflect on being a child and how much I loved to fly. No knowledge of the mechanics or crashing issues of the world, just the amazingness of being in the air and off to another land. I think it might be that my brain has grown to be filled with facts of human-error, mechanical-failure and basic bad luck.

No matter how many times I count the number of flights taking place per year thinking statistically I'll be fine or that I'm more likely to die from being hit by a coconut, it just does not take away the fact that we are simply TOO HIGH and if something goes wrong there is no out.

It's just not right. Why can't we fly 200 metres up? How can we trust this metal structure with so many miles between us and the earth. Every little bump or shake of the plane sends my gut and mind spiralling into "is that the engine failing?" or "what if something just stops". I start to do little prayers - rekindling my relationship with God. My mind starts to work overtime as I worry my bad thoughts will encourage crashing, so I start trying to generate a positive energy for the plane, thinking I have personal responsibility for the safety of the plane, as if my brain controls what happens next.
I need the movies to distract myself.

Every flight I ask that I just make it home one more time, as i'm not quite ready for dying. I just want to spend a little more time with my partner, or just see my family, or experience this upcoming project.. there is always an excuse.
I never quite reach the point where I accept that it could be the end of me.
So I clench my butt cheeks and harness my brain power to help the plane land safely.

When we get closer to the ground I start to envisage the plane crashing, just to see if I'd make it alive. Nup, too high, not possible, oh hang on, some trees, yes, they could buffer the fall, I constantly visualise the plane crashing and how I would react in group full of strangers, right up until we are metres for the ground and then I totally relax.
Each time I land, a warm glow enters my body, yes, I made it one more time.

After my last flight I declared that I wouldn't fly for a very long time. I can't bear the idea of this fear getting worse.
But then I got an invitation to one of my best friends weddings in Melbourne. And now I'm booked to go through it again.

There's no escape for a modern woman with a fear of flying.

[current mood] Star of Bethlehem Flower Essence & The Phone Ringing

A room of The Important Things for 2008 is here

The Important Things from 2007
The Important Things from 2006

I've awoken from another Doxycycline fuelled Armageddon dream to the sound of a frantic tapping.
I lift my mosquito net and tip toe across the buckled lino to the window.
The sound stops.
It sounded exactly like a man with a computer keyboard just banging on it at random. What the hell could it be?
Just outside my window at 3am?
I tell myself to relax and not let my all too vivid imagination come up with threatening concepts. So I fall back asleep.
I awake again at 6am to the sound of construction, metal being cut, blades spinning, pipes banging. It's boxing day in Papua New Guinea.
Significance factor, zero.

I've spent the lead up to Christmas here with virtual strangers, mostly in the back of a four wheel drive over potholed roads, going here, going there, getting into the spirit of 'waiting' more so than Christmas.
People will wait for hours and not complain. In one of many waiting episodes I asked where all the other people on the streets were walking.
"No where." a lady said.
"They don't have any jobs, so they just walk around."
And I finally GOT the notion of truly having nothing to do, and it explained the blank faces, the meandering walks, the rows of people just sitting with their bilum bags chewing betel nuts.

"There's No Place Like PNG" is the headline on the newspaper clipping on Florence's wall. Well, I think I agree. She is the head of many things, firstly the bilum fashion project, where she has initiated the transformation of the ubiquitous (and entirely gorgeous) bilum bags into fashion items.

The fully weaved dressed is Florence's initiative and has proved popular amongst PNG locals, even sported by Commonwealth game athletes. Now I'm here to mentor the weavers to create fashion products that will appeal globally. We're going to experiment for the next few weeks with hats and belts and eco-shopping bags to see what works. Then we'll develop a brand and package it up for marketing to the world.

All this will be intercepted by much much waiting.

Last night we waiting for a lift for 5 hours. It was suppose to be 2. Luckily she had the third series of Prison Break. We watched every one and laughed about how addictive it is. Her children laughed hardest at the man describing the Panama people as "banana benders".
I'm not sure on what level...

Florence, beyond her bilum fashion project is many things, and this year she organised the pre christmas celebrations. Carols by candlelight (a first in Goroka), SingSing dances, floats on trucks, santa at the hospital and so on.
I got to catch some of the festivities in the breaks I had between exhausted collapse in my little compound.

The highlight was the trip to the hospital with black santa and little santa with a white facemask on, which felt entirely creepy and emotionless. I thought it would surely make the children cry. We drove over thousands of potholes, a fire engine at the head with balloons attached in a volleyball net. With santa ringing his bell and the sound of the reversing truck beep...

And the second vehicle was a ute with a ten piece brass section playing christmas tunes. How they balanced on their plastic chairs over the bumps whilst keeping their lips on the mouthpieces I really don't know.
And then was us, in the fourwheeler, following the parade of two, to the hospital. Our car held the toilet paper and soap, a gift for all the really sick children, and the sack of second-hand stuffed toys and lollies to be dispersed as well (thank god, sweetens the toilet paper gift somewhat).

People stood by the side of the road and their faces lit up. Really. With the backdrop of fertile soil sprouting palms and fruit and dirty shacks and dirtier children, I could understand the impact of seeing this bright red fire truck with a man from the snow. I even met a mother picking up a flat red balloon from the dirt and trying to undo the knot in order to blow it up again for her baby.

I smiled from my window but didn't want to appear like I had anything to do with it.
I didn't feel I deserved to even be on board, to be seen as special in any way. I love that the whole convoy was generating by locals, for locals. No white person hand out. So I shied away from even waving, wanting to not show any responsibility for the beauty.

But then I felt rude, so I gave little smiles and waves.
It began to rain and the horns I imagined were filling up, and the drops splashed off their metallic red top hats but they played on with faces unchanged.

At the hospital the black and little santa handed out their sack of toys. I couldn't watch the kids with tubes in their noses with mothers on their bedside. I then entered another ward with men in skeletal form, doubled over their beds with a smell that I couldn't inhale, so I scuttled off into other parts of the hospital to take photos.

On the way home in the fourwheel with the santas, Florence would pull over dramatically to anyone with a baby and santa would hand them a toy. I would hear her ask "pikininni?" and only to the liklik ones would she hand over a toy and maybe a sweet. It was the oddest Christmas handout I'd ever experienced (okay, the only one) but the devilish way she drove, almost running the babies over, and pushing the toy out the window and speeding off, it was of stark contrast to the spirit of the thing. But the mothers with their pikininnis were calmly delighted.

Some other things I have experienced since I've been here:
I saw a group of people running down the street, they had all been involved in a clever shoe-stealing incident. Each passing the pair of shoes on to the next, until it reached the outside of the shop and then they split. The locals around me laughed at it, like comrades of the shoplifters. I laughed at the effort required to steal one pair of shoes. Who is going to wear this pair of shoes?
I've also had my bottom squeezed by a very old woman with no teeth because I didn't give her any of my change. Fair enough, and really not the worst response I could have imagined.
I've eaten 3 types of sausages, beef stirfry and old dry deep fried chicken, all in the one meal. And it is rude not to finish your plate isn't it.
I've bought that high quality Goroka coffee grind to make myself an almost latte. But discovered that it required a stove top or plunger of which I haven't found in any shop in Goroka yet. So instead I sifted it through a tea towel and added some (not properly sealed) vanilla soy milk. It has been the highlight of my days.

Everything here contains preservative. You can't get the basics of milk and bread because there really isn't any wheat or cows to milk. So instead you have to work with the climate, not eat like it's your own. Instead I am now eating boiled up kaokao (sweet potato), greens, like pumpkin leaves and rice. White rice.
All my purist, organic desires have been forcibly left on the shores of Australia, and in cultural sensitivity I must consume more chemicals, chipped Teflon and starchy food groups than ever before.
But the trick I've discovered is to avoid the supermarket and instead go to the markets or your new friend's gardens and find those PNG fresh things, like peanuts, pineapples, green leaves - any kind, raspberries, passionfruits, avocados. All free from the garden or ranging from 10cents to $1. Just pick and eat.

And soon I will venture into the betelnut (buoay) territory, the warming, high-giving nut that when mixed with lime powder (ducka) and a mustard stick (cumbun) turns a shocking red. The teeth of people everywhere are stained red or filled with chewed up pieces of betelnut. It's the most acceptable look here besides meri dresses (aka mumu) even though both are decidedly unattractive. And beware the flying red spit whose projectile-ability is perfected by age 6. I have seen it. They spit sideways with such precision. I'm sure they could aim for an ant 3 metres away and kill it with the impact.

These PNGers they can weave incredible patterns using a bit of broken umbrella, they can wait for hours and not utter a word, nor a word of complaint, they can not eat and not go to the toilet for hours and hours, although I assume it is the lack of eating and drinking which leads to the lack of toileting. And foremost the PNGers are sweet. They are truly sweet. They will wave and smile and shake hands with each other every day. What is it? Culture? Having nothing? Having each other?
Whatever it is, the people's sweetness courses through my veins.

ps: I am going to blog a lot more from now on.

[current mood] Passionfruit & Andrew Bird

The James McNulty Awards for Excellence in Television

1. The Wire drawing to a close. Say what you will about the relative strength of the newspaper arc relative to previous seasons, but for a show that promised to be the greatest television show ever made, we were not let down -- it finished as so much more than that. It wasn't about cops. It wasn't in the end even about The City, which I'd thought it was for the first few years. It was about hope, about systems, about order, dignity, dreams and change; it was about humanity, about the sheer brutal fucking hopelessness and futility that comes with trying to live and be part of this world. It was pretty funny too. I shan't spoil for those unfinished, but the final scene between Michael and Dookie may just be the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. For those entirely Wire virginal, perhaps because too many people have told you how excellent it is and that means you'll never watch it, don't be stupid. Get thee to a downloadery now.
2. The part in the first episode of the new Knight Rider series where the hot young leads strip to their underwear inside KITT, even before the opening credits. After KITT has changed both into and back from a GM pick-up truck. And just after they've been hit by a missile, after escaping from a tuxedo party in "Foreign Consulate, USA". To quote sassy nerd chick back at sassy control bunker full of sassy blinking lights: "Things just got interesting!"
3. David Simon and Ed Burns get a second nod for what was, in the end, an underappreciated series, Generation Kill. This mini-series managed a tough balancing act, presenting a scathing assessment of the early stages of the Iraq war and its planning, while being fair and loving and fiercely proud of the troops on the ground, be they racist fuckup redneck shits or genuinely good sensitive guys lost in a desert far from moral ground. They are the people that were sent there to die. For long-stretches of episodes, nothing happens except the talking of crap. And then things go crazy. And then more crap is talked. We stay frosty, we wait. I'm naive in the art of warfare, I'll admit, but this felt so much more real, immediate and important than any of the hundreds of preachy message films released on same topic by Hollywood this year.
4. Lost not just jumping the Dharma-branded shark but sucking it into a space-time vortex and moving it somewhere where we'll never find it. Season four was glorious and silly and not at all concerned any more for the impatient, or those who don't feel like googling theoretical physicists. As it should never have been.
5. 24: "Redemption", in which JACK BAUER saves Africa in two hours with no help from those pesky UN-ocrats who just won't think of the CHILDREN. See particularly JACK BAUER using Crocodile Dundee-style animal-taming hypnosis against a wild-eyed child soldier.
6. Jimmy Smits on Dexter. The third season of everybody's favourite good-guy serial killer show got mixed reviews -- I loved it, but mostly because I spent the entire season trying to figure out just what the hell was going on with Smits' completely nutso performance. It can be tough to play against everything Michael C. Hall has brought to the title role, but Smits went punch for punch and scalpel blade for scalpel blade.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

-- Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

My mother has wrapped her shrubbery carefully in hessian sacks. Snow coats everything. This is home, here at the end of the earth. This is where I slow down. The power is out, I'm writing on my remaining battery with assistance only of the light of a log fire. How very rustic. A sliver of iceberg melts into my single malt, Scottish coastal fire mixing with Canadian coastal ice. I romanticise a little, of course -- the plasma TV was on not half an hour ago, I'm still playing games on my iPhone. But let's just pretend for a moment we're rugged and slightly insane Irish fisherfolk, stubbornly refusing to be defeated by something so paltry as Atlantic Canadian winter. "Is this all you've got?" we'd shout to the wind, scooping up our abundant nets of winter cod with a defiant glee. We'd build our houses on the sides of cliffs, sail into twelve foot waves on our rickety wooden boats, throw down the nets we'd woven by hand with our whalebone needles. We'd laugh at it all. We'd be the masters of the ocean. The whales would be elsewhere, ever the more sensible species, somewhere down in Bermuda awaiting return on the warm currents of spring with a calm and sanity we ourselves would never possess.

Or we could be the masters of the strip mall, the jumbo-sized tin of processed sausage or frozen juice, the great Canadian diet of sugar and preservative. We'd spend our liminal summers watching wrestling on stolen cable, lines run down from the poles by uncles with usefully tall ladders. Salt fish in buckets, salt beef in buckets, salt in buckets. Cod tongues in oil on the stove. Always the smell of drying animal flesh, picked over by flies, stretched out in the sun. Tobacco, rolled into cigarettes by the hundreds, in the hands of everyone, always. Collections of Molson Canadian bottles from the back sheds of drunken neighbours, exchanged for deposit, exchanged for sugar and rented Nintendo. And then later, exchanged for Canadian Club, cigarettes snuck under bridges from older cousins, retreats deep into the woods far from the roving eyes of adult supervision. The rules that governed you at home would not apply here in your other space, with these other people. Your blood people. These ones wouldn't see the awkward little nerd with the bottle-base glasses and shaky hands so much as just a boy from somewhere strange, full of different ideas and different experience. A wholly exotic little Scottish other. Your time here would be something else. Eventually, we would have to go home. But not yet, not yet.

Now I watch the ocean do its thing, dare the water to tell me something I don't know; to speak something new with those waves that I haven't learned in all these years of coming here. Daring the Atlantic to tell you anything is almost always folly, but occasionally she'll give something up if you phrase your question just right. Get it wrong, she'll let you know soon enough.