Twenty-three years ago today E. was born, in B., at the midwives-only birth center (just the same as A. 35 months earlier) – by now she was already several hours old. She’s not here, but after significant peregrinations, I am. Back in B. It all seems a bit ridiculous or surreal at times. Why am I here? In this place? I don’t get it. Meanwhile, she’s in Vancouver, where, given the insane real estate market, her prospects for a more permanent home in the city are significantly diminished.
A., meanwhile, is firming up his Berlin plans with ever greater doses of happy coincidences. He has an airbnb lined up for the first one to two weeks, and now it looks like he might have an apartment, too, till the end of June. All through connections (the all-vital Vitamin “C” – known as Vitamin B, for Beziehungen in German, or maybe we should just call it Vitamin N for networks). This is how luck is created: networks, connections, and putting oneself in their paths. If, on the other hand, one sits at home, in the house – the oh-so-lovely house – away from the action (wherever that might be), one will never find oneself at the crossroads of fortuitous circumstance, opportunity, and plain (or not so plain) luck.
Well, and then there’s the weather. Today it’s frigid like all get-0ut. Single digit “feels like” temps – in Fahrenheit. Everything looks desiccated, all the moisture frozen from each molecule and evaporated into the dry, arctic air, leaving behind an even coating of white, even on the by-now well-traveled [street]. The momentary heat of tires rotating with plenty of friction across that white pavement can’t displace the icy sign of whiteness, can’t force even a trace of that underlying black road to appear. Spooky, really. Like the whole neighborhood got ghosted, forgotten by a more benign nature which has fucked off to who-knows-where.
And speaking of nature and weather, there are two amazing meteorological terms I’ve become familiar with since coming back here: bombogenesis and cyclogenesis. Apparently we could be due to see both by Tuesday, the day A. is supposed to leave. In which case I’m not holding my breath he’ll actually get out, but maybe everything will move further off-shore and fail to affect us at all. We shall see. I’m grappling with being here, in B. In New England. Even in America… The old problem of where to find my “tribe,” the old (Groucho) Marx(ist) (or was it Dorothy Parker?) line about not wanting to join a club that would have me as a member… Thoughts of possibly moving to Montreal to evade the insanity of this country in its current – which is a continuation, logical, of its past – incarnation, as well as the cul-de-sac-ness of the suburbs shrivel when the weather is like this, though, and I have to take Quebec’s motto into serious account, at which point I realize it’s just not me: mon pays n’est pas un pays – mon pays c’est l’hiver. No no no. I’m a weather wimp.
Another boring entry. Don’t know what’s up with me lately. After some initial bursts which seemed creative or introspective, I’ve devolved to mush. I think politics is depressing me way too much.