A friend called me the other day at work to inquire about my sanity. Which was nice. He said he was worried after reading this blog. Funny how we relate these days. He took me out to lunch. I had a Mick chicken burger at the Mayflower, the day after the Stones were in town. The meat came heavily breaded, deep fried and, with the melted Monterey Jack, looked more like a Keith Richards close-up than the mug of the big-lipped guy. The side salad was limp. What does this mean? It turned out the friend had troubles of his own. As he was sharing, he started to weep, so…

The bus was empty when I got on this morning, already deep into a “first fiction” piece in the New Yorker about two kids snorkeling in a boat graveyard for their dead sister. At the next stop, a pair of shiny slip-on loafers broke the story’s spell. They were attached to a middle-aged man in a golf shirt asking me to take my laptop off the seat next to me so he could sit down. He plunked down next to me, and I surprised myself by jumping up to move to another of the forty-odd vacant seats that remained. Why did he have to sit next to me? A compulsive…

Suzy took the kids to her sister’s place this morning. So I’m sitting under an umbrella with my laptop, surfing on someone else’s unsecured wireless network. Wahoo! 21st-Century Risk. My hard drive is exposed to the world and I don’t care. Turning Japanese is playing. It’s the only song I have downloaded on this computer, sent to me by e-mail one afternoon at work to turn my already distracted mind to mush. I brought the laptop out here so I could listen to music on CD, but the drive keeps spitting out the “Canadian Songs Vol 2” that Elizabeth burned for me. A few minutes before that I started to…

Thanks for dropping by the cabin, and especially for all the great e-mails this week! Given the response to family revelations (below), I’m thinking of selling the movie rights. 🙂 I’m taking a week off, but please come back. It’s been an intense summer — a very good one. Project Porchlight is moving ahead. Work is busy and interesting. Simon’s about to walk. Suzy has just checked “All Families are Psychotic,” (how appropriate) by Douglas Coupland, from the library. I’m looking forward to a week of reading and R&R before an inevitably hectic autumn arrives. When I get tense, my breathing gets shallow and I look pinched and old. This…

I’m walking wounded today. Last night I was told that my dad’s wife, Joan, has ”nothing left” to give me as a token of my father. Dad died four years ago, and I finally screwed up my courage this week to ask my Aunt Mary to raise this issue with Joan. Mary got back to me within a day with the bad news, and added rather matter-of-factly, “You should have asked for something earlier.” Funny, I didn’t think I had to ask for a memento of my dad. She didn’t see it that way. So I called Joan directly (from work). She has call display, so I was surprised she…

First the cabin was robbed. Then the web site went down. The kind people who host the site for me for free are actually staying in the cabin right now, battling hornets under the step. I understand that there is a lot of fogging and foaming going on, and hundreds of hornets wobbling in agony all over the place. A battlefield! Henry David Thoreau probably would have whacked the next with a stiff broom — or left it alone. Who knows? Today’s sunny and not too hot. Nice. I decided to take the bus this morning so I could finish Douglas Coupland’s Hey! Nostradamus. A great book, but fairly bleak.…

Confirm $200,000 support for Porchlight campaign. Find volunteers to distribute 50,000 light bulbs door-to-door in Ottawa. Figure out where to get a microphone for the Premier’s speech. Take a deep breath. I’m looking for a project manager/events planner genius. If you know someone who is available for the next 3 months, please let me know!

We got the money (see below) Our project will mean 100,000 half-ton truckloads of coal will not be burned. Now that’s cool. Wanna volunteer? Please!

Walden Cabin was robbed this weekend. Our housekeeper Eileen stopped in to prepare the place for guests and the locks were gone. She bolted like she’d seen a ghost, without even going inside. I don’t blame her. She called to tell me and I spent a strange few hours contemplating the range of possible news: The place was trashed. Everything was gone. Someone had written Thoreau Poser! in squashed purple coneflower on the walls. That would hurt. I got an update on the train to Toronto. My neighbour Allan broke the news. The toaster oven is gone. No damage. No messages. But no more TV dinners. I was relieved. As…

I think I’m dying. Which must mean that things are going extremely well. I suffer from a range of neuroses that creep up from the pit of my past and hold me back, mostly just when I’m about to finally see the results of a lot of hard work. It’s pretty stupid. Which is why I have to expose it to air here. That’s one thing about neurotic or paranoid fears. Say them out loud and they are revealed for what they are: ridiculous. The pain on the right side of my abdomen (which has me worried about imminent doom: cancer!), goes away when I eat. Suzy puts it into…