Hovering Around Zero

Greg Kehlor is singing "save myself" from the Blue Rodeo album Nowhere To Here on the stereo. Actually, the poster from the Vancouver tour date for this album was my going away present from Ratcliff & Co. It is related.

On Lavalife there are many spelling mistakes. A common one being "your" when what is meant is "you are" (yes, these are two different things, although the cyber world may be melding both into "ur", which I don't think is a good trend).

Went to the gym this morning. 600 calories on the elipitical exercise machine ... 45 minutes. The step aerobics class started in the midst of my time, which was a bit distracting, especially the new girl who didn't know the routine. Watching English football on the tv screen; seemed more interesting this time. Reminded me of that book "Fever Pitch".

I weighed myself at 87.2 kilos, so I think I have the knack of using the scale properly.

R. told me that her ex asked her to go out on a cruise. She has two new dresses.

S. broke radio silence today to make sure I was doing okay. I responded and we chatted, but the 30 day embargo remains on my end. Still writing the letter.

I cooked curried chicken, but it didn't turn out quite right. Didn't taste bad, just was not what I get from S (or R) when they cook it.

I have some ginger snap cookies, put some in a bowl and promptly ate them all. But I am resisting the urge to refill the bowl.

Went down to the Yellowknife arena. Not bad at all. Smell and all that brought back memories. However, discovered that I need new hockey pants and a helmet. So I can't play with "WIMPS" for a while yet. But I will. Long season.

Greg again ... Side Of The Road.

Fox

Okay. Got out of bed and out of the apartment before 6:00 am. On the way to the gym I saw a bushy and big artic fox (well, big for a fox) just around the corner, which was a little odd as this is a very much a residential area. The fox only skittered away from about 20 feet when he saw me. Obviously he/she was use to humans.

Did my time at the gym. 87.25 kilos; consistency at last.

Trying to rewrite the Trinidad travel piece. Have to make a theme. Haven't painted a picture of the country there with words.

Finished the Sir Vida's Shadow book about V.S. Naipaul. Got the Texasville book by Larry McMurty in the mail.

Went to the CIBC and got a roll of loonies. The dryer in the laundry room here devours them; two or even three to dry a load of laundry.

Got some information about incentives for doctors in the north; sent it to S without comment; didn't conceive of that as breaking the pleading imbargo.

In my rolling letter to S I desribed our lovely day in Hyde park back in September. Will mail it about November 10.

Slept In

Oddly enough, the alarm went off at 5:30 am and I woke up and started listening to the Nunuvut CBC news in English, then immediately fell asleep again, only to wake up when the news switched to Inuvilukten (sp.) a few minutes later. Got out of bed and started to get ready to go to the gym, but just felt too darn tired and went back to bed.

Slept until 7:00 am.

Was ready the Theroux book on Naipaul until too late too many nights in a row. Almost finished it.

Worked all morning on the Trinidad travel piece.

More

scale now says 87.4 kilos; all the lock brackets are worn off and so it slides too easily, but I think I have it figured out now.

Somebody was shovelling off the walk in front of the apartment building at 5:00 am today

My rent will go up to $1,010 in a few months ... notice received under the door.

Scale Measurement

Okay. I put all my cds into my cd player, once I got the stereo going, simply one after another, not spaced out or organized alphabetically or anything (took me all evening ... had to put in the names again). And now I just turn it on and let it play where it left off instead of picking out same half dozen or ten cds the ones I want to hear and now it just goes and goes and, you know, I bought all these cds for a reason, although I hardly played many of them ever. But now I am going to get to hear them all. And it is good. Small minds, eh.

87.5 kilos; I've the scale figured out at last so I think this is accurate; 192 pounds. So, first goal: get to the 86 kilos I thought I was.

First installment of the letter to S. Forty-eight hours and I'm doing okay.

I'm going to Inuvik on Monday as part of my job duties, which is not big news but it might allow me to get the latest issue of the NY Review of Books; I have a subscription but they tend to be slow to start. Inuvik is where I started reading the Review and they have a very complete magazine shop where they use to stock the Review and hopefully they still do. Circles, circles.

Okay -- soon I will have to write an explanation as to why I figured the USA invading Iraq was a good idea when it has turned out to be such a disaster. Yes, coming soon!

Message About Naipaul

[copy of a message]

Hi XXXX,

The Magic Seeds is about a man from India who has been in Africa and England much of his life and goes back to India in the ''70s or ''80s (it is not exactly clear) to take part in some sort of rural revolt of the peasants against the landowners, etc. (you know, there was this phase of shooting traffic policeman, etc.). In some ways the book mirrors the travel book India: A Million Mutinies Now that Naipaul wrote 20 years ago or so. In that book he interviewed people who had been involved in that type of revolt ... Students going out into the country side, etc., and then had left it being disillusioned. I am being un-exact and I hope you will forgive me.

Now, as with most Naipaul books the attraction is not so much the action as the writing and the interior life of the main character. Naipaul is a very great writer indeed, but he seems not to be to everyone's taste. It seems to me that his writing nearly always includes comments/observations that would have made good essay points in a paper produced at Oxford. Naipaul was an exceptionally good student (won a scholarship to Oxford from Trinidad at age 18 or so by being the best student of his year).

The good thing about literature is that nothing good detracts from something else good, although that doesn't stop the people who write literature from being competitive and concerned with ranking and relative merit. But different styles and approaches, if they are good and true, tend to compliment each other, however much they may be in contrast. For example, Naipaul is what I might be tempted to call a "flat" writer. His prose is so clear and cold and perfect that you hardly see it at all. Martin Amis, who I also adore, is very much a "verdant" or "topographical" writer and his writing itself can be a thing of wonder. Two very different approaches, and I would be very much the poorer if either one had to be eliminated to make room for the other.

Yes, all my tawdry belongs are now here in Yellowknife, cluttering up my new apartment which had a certain clean and spartan appeal when it was just flat carpets and empty walls.

I haven't unpacked all my books yet. I am starting to make a pile by my bed of books I really must read rather than simply warehousing for year after year.

Went to the gym this morning at 6 am. 87.5 kilos according to the scale there, but it seems to fluctuate more than my weight I think.

30 Days

In an effort to help S. beak up with me, I have agreed not to contact her for 30 days. My idea, not hers. But she refuses to take the responsibility to say it is over, and I can't bear to do it. Maybe in 30 days she will realize something or other like how she can't live without me, etc.. Maybe it will all be salvaged then. Of course, the opposite result -- that things are so cold and dead in 30 days that they can be brought back to life -- is much more likely.

My stomach feels heavy and warm; terrible feeling.

Took my Duthie's Book bag to the Extra Foods to save on the number of plastic bags I am brining home.

New Book

I have put Oscar and Lucinda aside for a time -- not out of any unhappiness with the book, but Lucinda seems to have picked out the ungainly Oscar out to the object of her affections on the Leviathen as they steam towards Australia and I feel comfortable that I can pick up this excellent novel again easily -- in order to read Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux. I haven't heard much of Mr. Theroux before, and this seems to have been a lacuana in my reading which I hope to set aright before too long. I made the mistake of dipping into the book, which is filled with personal information about VS Naipaul, whose many books I quite adore, and now it is another temptation I can't ignore.

(Is there a spell checker in this thing? At least I have my dictionaries now unpacked and waiting calmly on the bookshelf for moments such as this. "aright"? Is that a word? It is an oral word, but it is a written word?)

85.5 kilos today despite breaking into the halloween candy bag.

Bought copper pot scrubbing coils today on the way back from the gym. Extra foods is open on Sunday, 10 to 6. Slowly finding out more and about Yellowknife.

S came on-line and then went invisible.

Laundry in, dishes dirty, floor needing vacuuming (which I will very much enjoy once I get underway), but all I want to do is read my new book. It is fun to read things that Theroux did with Naipaul which I recognize very easily as scenes from his books. In A Free State I think.

Can't forget the library this afternoon.

At Last

Okay. Now I can allow access to the profile. It's like this: the old profile dragged up old postings and didn't change when I changed the old postings. But now they do. So I can.

86.5 kilos (86 on Thursday).

Reading Oscar and Lucinda.

Lady called me (the high heeled shoes lady) because of the moving boxes piled neatly on the sidewalk for three hours. Funny, funny.

Room 231 at the YK Inn. Checked out now. Want to write that number down. I realize that this fascination with things that happened is part of a struggle against time and against death. Probably slightly neurotic. Watched an old tape looking for electric circus while the cable wasn't hooked up; found two hour episodes of Lincoln and Freud.

Now that winter is here (more or less) and the air is dry I need the handcream to keep my hands supple. And the skin on my heel is cracking.

New computer. All hooked up on Friday.

Today didn't go the gym until noon; talking to London on the web cam; then Odessa; then San Fernando; then Peru (after a long absence); then London again.

Problems with the internet connection at times.

Cooked roast beef for dinner.

More Colitis

More colitis this afternoon. Isn't technology wonderful! People on multiple continents can, by virtue of this blog, keep track of the nature of the movement of my bowels.

To eat? That is the question (forget Hamlet; what did he know anyway?)

October 11, 2004

It seems the GNWT has extended my stay at the Yellowknife Inn until friday, which is good. I had asked them to do that, as that is when my furniture shows up from Vancouver, but they didn't tell me that they had done it. I have been carting over some of the clothes, etc., that I brought with me on the airplane to the new apartment. Will put tin-foil on the bedroom window for now, I think, and get proper curtains in the Spring.

Messages from Bombay, and Odessa (plus a message sent a month a go from the Spanish teacher in T.). Disputations with Ranu as to mortgages, travel, and my youngest child.

Lost one of my thin gloves today.

At The Diner they are having a turkey dinner tonight, so I guess I'll go there. The chinese lady told me that as I was paying for breakfast.

Colitis woke me up at 3:00 am. Could have been chocolate, stress, too much Vitamin C, or maybe something else. Uncertainty often is a trigger. Oh well.

She Did (high heels)

Well, the lady from the property management firm did wear her high heels again, but it was okay this time, as there is no snow around.

S. says that nothing is nothing, but jealousy is something, but you can't beat Romeo and Juliet, even if Rick takes you to a West End cinema to see a scottish film that says different. She has another admirer, only 21, who has gone off to Georgia, where S. longs to be as well.

Can't get anybody to marry me it seems.

Finished Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul.

This building has a cinema on the first floor; when they make popcorn you can smell it way up here on the 7th floor.

Missing Thanksgiving with the family in Surrey. Sigh.

October 9, 2004 (am)

Breakfast at the diner. Temperature flickering around zero. Sidewalks are temporarily bare, exposed to the ice and snow which will soon cover them again, and this time until next May

Have to meet the Fillipino (?) lady from Toronto who will give me the keys to my new apartment in a while. I wonder if she will still be wearing high heels?

Found two pairs of underwear that I had forgotten I had brought with me.

A cheque fo Christopher - have to mail it back south to him.

Yellowknife

Yes, Yellowknife now. Snow and such. Not very pleasant. Work as dead as ashes.

S. is in Croyden. Much warmer than Yellowknife I'm sure.

I walked around Frame Lake. The hospital is large and modern. If only a photograph as an attachment would get my best beloved here with me.