Concussed in Centretown

Its been quite a week.

During a brief return to the ancestral Glen, over the hills and far away, amidst the excitement of demonstrating the technological marvels of my newly purchased set of wheels, I managed to sustain a concussion. I suppose things were going a little too well, and The Universe felt the need to redress the delicate balance between my sense of well-being and abject misery. Irregardless, work had to carry on. Now that I have the official diagnosis, however, I have a mandated reprieve.

The diagnosis was only acquired, as per usual, after a character-building ordeal had been exhaustingly endured. After suffering headaches for several days, I made the ill-advised decision to "do something about it." I knew what this entailed, a completely wasted and unavoidably uncomfortable exercise of Stoic self-command and exquisite ennui. I already had a regular diagnostic MRI that was scheduled before the Unknown Violent Event, so I got the brilliant idea that I would go down to the General Hospital early and try to get my 10 pm brain scan expanded to include a check for any further head trauma. Little did I know that the General Hospital would be a scene not only of soap opera melodramatics, but melancholic madness and protracted patience.

Having not yet consummated my Faustian bargain for a downtown parking spot, I took a cab to General Hospital around four pm. There were early portents that this little trip wasn't going to go well. My cabbie was an affable Pole, and he took a shine to me after I correctly recognized his Polish/Slovak accent. While driving down O'Connor, some ditz in a silver Mustang scraped along the rear passenger door where I was sitting. I then rode along with the cabbie as he chased down the Mustang like he was William Peterson in To Live and Die in L.A. She seemed to be an entitled, well-fed public servant who claimed she had the radio on full blast and never felt a thing. Her Mustang bore the battle scars of many other such skillful lane changes. For a time it looked like I would be subpoenaed as a witness, which is something my life is dearly lacking.

Anyway, on to the General Hospital we go. After our bonding experience, the cabbie felt compelled to give me his life story and a quite detailed exposition of his son's recent head troubles and the necessity of positivity. I appreciated the sentiments, but quite frankly, like so many other cancer victims, I've grown weary of the general prescription to be relentlessly positive, that the "bad thoughts" will make the cancer grow again, and that you're a "new" and "better" person if you've "beaten" cancer. I realize that people mean well, obviously, but the downside of this is the Oprahfied snake-oil business that profits from this religion of eternal gratitude and its fraudulent "science of happiness". Sometimes shit just happens, and you have to adjust and get over it. I've rarely complained -- its just been a massive interruption in my life and I'm delighted that it didn't kill me, thanks to contemporary medical science. Everything else is just a psychological and epistemological prop, and I do find them extraordinarily helpful quite often, but that doesn't mean that I can't consider them for what I believe they are. And I don't think it necessarily diminishes them to do so.

I finally extricated myself from the cab and entered the General Hospital. Everything started out well. I got past the vanguard within an hour, all registered up and ready to go. I managed to infiltrate more and more checkpoints, and I was quickly directed to "Urgent Care". I was sitting in my little examination room by 5:15. I had two complete issues of the TLS to keep me occupied, lots of time to get checked out and link up the regular MRI with the Unknown Violent Event that happened over the weekend.

They never pulled the curtain around my tiny examination room, as I was apparently lucid and physically intact, despite the internal throbbing of my head. I was reminded of the Hull jail, as I could hear wailing and moaning emanating out of distant examination cubicles. I knew an incident must have occurred, as there were cops everywhere, and a security guard parked in a seat outside one of the exam cubicles. At the entrance to Emergency they were circling a homeless guy who was prone and semi-conscious before the registration bunker.

But I was now behind the lines. As my curtain was left open, I was able to inspect most of the other cells with a panoptic gaze. Except for the room beside mine. From what I could hear, it seemed to be a very agitated Francophone oldtimer, and he was continuously yelling loudly in French that he needed attention and wanted to make a phone call. No amount of soothing could calm him down, and finally he was led to a telephone. He was wearing some kind of navy blue Hawaiian shirt with identically matching blue shorts with Hawaiian or Floridian motif. Even when instructed in French by the janitor and the rather unimposing security guard, he was unable to figure out the dial 9 and number procedure. It also took some time for him to retrieve his son's phone number from his agitated memory. All of this was accompanied by a high decibel commentary to oblivious medical staff. After about a half hour of continuous dialing and shouts of "occupe"! he gave up and started to wander around the rooms, including mine, until the security guard led him back to his cubicle. After he was attended to, a mother and her brat moved in next door. He was one of those demanding brats who demanded gratification by the minute. The mother seemed to know all the nurses, and a little hen party was staged while I fumed and fevered in the next cubicle.

Meanwhile, after I had burned though all of my reading material, the clock on the wall showed 7:15. I sat dumbfounded for another hour until 8:30. Finally, what appeared to be a 12 yr-old girl holding a clipboard entered my cubicle. There had been a few false dawns over the previous 3 hours in the little examination room, but they all turned out to be nurses. I think I described what was wrong with me about 4 times. By that point, I had almost forgotten why I was there in the first place.

The 12 yr-old girl told me she was a medical student, and she began to ask me again what was wrong with me. I had many questions for her, but all of her responses were prefaced with something like "I'm new here" and "I can't confirm that". It wasn't very encouraging, or reassuring. By then it was almost time to run over to radiology for my 9:30 check-in for the already scheduled MRI. I got my concussion diagnosis and bolted out, hoping to get something to eat before going in the tube. I asked around. "No, the cafeteria and the Tim Horton's closed at 9. But there are vending machines." I grabbed a nutritious meal of Doritos and chocolate milk.

When I got to Radiology, after what seemed like a race from terminal to terminal at the O'Hare airport, they told me rather bluntly that they were "about an hour" behind, and 2 people are ahead of me. With nothing left to read, I wandered around the hospital. This time of night, nothing was going on. I felt like Cillian Murphy when he wakes up in the deserted hospital in 28 Days Later.

I returned to the MRI department. Some kind of power failure that only appeared to affect their machines. Funny thing, eh? You better wait and get it done though, given your state. I did another few laps of the Deserted Village, then I returned around midnight. We'll have to reschedule you for 8:30 Saturday morning, sir.

I took another cab home, dazed and confused. From 4 to 12:30, and 2 cab rides, and nothing really accomplished. But I had the concussion diagnosis in my hand.

Many is a word that only leaves you guessin',
Guessin' 'bout a thing that you really ought to know.
You really ought to know.
I really ought to know.

Bell Rung Blues

Finally poppin' the June cherry. No other reason for a post. Got my bell rung on Saturday. Something ain't right. I've had a headache for four days running.

Got the blues big time. No more hockey. Trying to wrap my scrambled mind around the footie, to no avail.

However, fantasy hockey league entry draft this Sunday. And now I'm in a fantasy football league, so that will provide some relief this summer from the quotidian tedium of work.

I had a dream last night that I was getting it on with Anna Paquin, or somebody who looked like her anyway. There are not many stable identities in my nocturnal circus. On a subliminal level, it seems, a substitution has been made to my fantasy fuck roster.

Bookless in Bytowne

Its one of those scorched earth days. I hope the little AC unit that could keeps chugging away for at least a couple more days. Radio on the TV is playing a song called "Jesus Stole My Girlfriend". I tried to warn you guys about that dude.

Now that my brain is no longer on fire, and I've replenished some vital fluids, I'm just hoping my laptop doesn't blow up.

After the walk home, I am still disoriented, and not just from the mind melting heat. After getting to our National Repository, the reputed Holy Grail of universal knowledge, I ran into the Square Corner. He looked ready for a safari of satisfying discovery. I, on the other hand, had no idea what lay before me. The disappointments, the confusion, the enclosures put upon erudition and enlightenment.

After an hour or so of fruitless file searching, I decided to make the most of my day in this City of Books. I've explored a lot of those, but not so much this Biblopolis. Besides, I took a cab to avoid the heat, it was air conditioned. I've already had my cover blown. What's the hurry? I'm gonna look at some books while I'm here at the National LIBRARY. Yes, I knew all about the file boxes and microforms. But I wanted to find some books. Books that I was actually interested in having a look at. Another hour or so of peeking through a few books in the air conditioned environs. Life today wasn't that bad, I thought.

It started well. I called up some references. It was fun to find my print presence, one microformed, one bound. Shit, that birthdate makes me feel old. But I wanted to find some other books that I hadn't seen for a while, as well as a couple of new ones. Armed with my call numbers I started walking around between the floors. Reference rooms, meeting rooms, empty exhibition rooms, genealogy rooms, microform rooms, file box rooms. Fair enough, but where are the books? Dictionaries, encyclopedias, finding aides, books to help you find books. Great, but where are the books? I kept searching, riding the elevator like an amusement ride at the county fair. I felt like I was caught, as Borges was, in the labyrinthine Library of Babel. Wandering in search of a book. Not a catalogue of catalogues. I didn't know the universal language of this place.

Finally, I sheepishly slid over to one of the ubiquitous "reference" desks before I made a complete fool of myself by climbing back onto the elevator. Too late for that -- at least I got something done today. Yeah ... uh ... I've got my Library of Congress call numbers here, I'm just looking for the book stacks. The what? The books. Where are the books? As Bomber would say, it wasn't very encouraging. Where is the "library" part of Library and Archives Canada? I'm familiar with the archival stuff, where is the National Library? Even the patrons of the reference room raised their heads, interrupting their monastic vigils over the endless boxes of index cards. I felt like a Golden Ass.

"Oh, there is no National Library anymore. The public isn't allowed access to the books. They're in the basement, or in Gatineau. If you want to order a book that is in the basement, you will need to order it. You'll get it in an hour or so".

OK, I realize that you just can't romp through the stacks in the Library of Congress or the British Library. But I wasn't asking for the Vulgate Bible or the Book of Kells. I might as well have been requesting "Tintin in Tibet". And this didn't look or feel like the Library of Congress. It's a depressingly dull five-floor box with arrow-slit windows. It looks and feels more like a military bunker than a National Library.

I suppose in a few years they won't even bother to print and bind books anymore -- "content" will just be published to Kindle.

I gotta get back to building that levee.

Tubthumping

Still got the Galaxie going. Thin Lizzy just made a Jail Break. Now its an Early Distant Warning. Starting to get antsy about the game tonight. The Blog is becalming.

That talk about French and the Gentleman's Club got me thinking about all the anthropological field research I've done over the years. In one of those notebooks, there would be an entry about the behaviour of bouncers in their most natural habitat. On an Attic evening, many many moons ago, a member of the posse decided to put some money out for the "entertainer". He folded the bills into clean, crisp cones on the stage before him. Over she came, scooped them up, gushing gratitude.

It didn't take long before the environment became contaminated, and we all went from detached observation to complicit co-agency. The entertainer wasn't pleased. Nor was the bouncer. He clapped his hand on the not so generous offender, and told him, in bouncer-speak, to put his nice money away or get the fuck out. Not that the warning was heeded. A few minutes later, I rather unnimbly fell off my chair, and the bouncer put an end to the Attic evening. Good food next door, though. Sha-war-ma, Mama!

From time to time, this clown would hang around with Lauzzy and I. A lot of memories with Lauzzy. Back in the salad days. I remember the time we scouted out for a student halfhouse -- Lauzzy driving his 1979 Cordoba, Bomber in the back, and myself riding shotgun. Wrong way down the one-way. No problem, we're in the Cordoba. We found the Miracle on Concord. It was perfect, but it was currently rented to a Greenpeace family. The pungent air was going to take a while to dissipate. We reached a deal with the landlord down in the basement -- later it would be sealed over a couple of Molson Goldens from his personal stock. But that inital afternoon, as we harangued over the rent, I couldn't help but notice the videotape on top of the dryer. Right over the wildly gesticulating landlord's shoulder. While the genre was obvious, I couldn't make out the title. Using the available visual evidence on the cover, I decided that it was entitled "Anal Aggressor". An Is/Ought formulation, if ever there was one. I got a lot of mileage out of that one. Seemed the Greenpeaceniks had other interests beyond saving the whales.

Just as soon as we moved in, Bomber got sick and skipped out. On short notice, we got somebody in. Doug Carpenter's niece. It wasn't a Royal experience. By the second year, Bomber came back, and we squeezed him into the closet leading to the balcony. I still remember the early mornings. After a bacchanalian debauch, we could hear Lauzzy in the bathtub by 7 am. He usually got through a book chapter during his morning tubthumps. By the late afternoon, in a usually unsuccessful attempt to rouse me from the burnoff, he would throw a few ancient 45's on his 'family stereo unit' and turn it to eleven. Somehow, I'd manage to keep sleeping through the usual trilogy of "Video Killed the Radio Star", "Rock Lobster", and "Brown Girl in the Rain." A wiser man than I, he knew how to stop. I rarely could.

When I had met Lauzzy a few years earlier, right after I walked away from a car accident that, by all rights, should have left me in a wheelchair, I had decided to reform myself. To give it the old college try. It was the fall/winter of 1992/93. Mario and the Penguins had just won the Cup for the second straight year. We were in the same class. I was being introduced to subjects called "Historiography" and "Intellectual History". Things were beginning to come together for me -- a long held inerest in historical writing, a fascination with the 18th century and the anatomy of literary criticism. At the end of every class, I'd see him haranguing with the intellectual historian. He looked like a grunge kid, I remember thinking, emulating Eddie Vedder. That initial description baffles him now, long after ditching the plaid undergraduate hand-me-downs. He and I seemed to be the only ones who didn't hate this class. I think in our own ways, it was a refuge. For myself, it was a safe haven, away from the ahistorical excess of English literature. For him, a phalanx against the (equally ahistorical) philosophers.

That year was a fulcrum point of its own for me. I have my doubts that I would have continued with graduate studies. I got knocked down, then I got up again.

Thanks for that, Lauzzy.

I'm waiting for my signed copy of the book. Its genesis was forged in the marginalic crucible of the Concord St. tub, I think.

Cannes you dig it?

Its a great morning, even if its now the afternoon. Got up early, made pancakes from scratch, real Quebec maple syrup. The fumes from the Zaphodiad have fully burned off. Galaxie is playing The Scorpions (you know the one). Wish it was Can't Live Without You. Now its Nickelback -- time to change the channel. Black Sabbath's "Warning", that's better. I'm going to miss my Radio/TV on the TV/Radio. Les Glorieux and Flyers tonight. I don't even mind if the Flyers win. I'm more of a Secondary Twelve guy anyway (or Tertiary 21, to be honest). I'm too young to remember the Bullies, unless you count Pat Quinn's Cup Finalist in 1979/80, post Shero. I remember that team won 35 games in a row that season, or something stupendous like that. They still had Clarkie, Leach, Barber, Mel Bridgeman (whatever happened to Ottawa's first GM -- he blazed like a comet across the sky). And a young Kenny "The Rat" Linseman. No Bernie Parent, though -- Pelle Lindbergh was still in Sweden, so Pete Peeters was between the pipes. Les Glorieux had been knocked out in the first round by the North Stars -- Gilles Meloche stood on his head, and rookie Craig Hartsburg had emerged from the rubble of the WHA. No fifth cup in a row. The Flyers I started to watch were Quinn's, then the Iron Mike editions in the 80s. Now that this is Paul Holmgren's team, I'm seeing some similarities. To get you ready for the game, go youtube "Flyers Canadiens brawl 1987". The pregame skate. Eddie Hospodar, Claude Lemieux, even Chico Resch. I love how Chris Nilan just meanders from the bench, resigned to his role, but ready to rumble. I tried to post the video, but I'm still new to this blog thing.

The Cannes Film Festival wraps up today. Looked to be a lacklustre lineup, unlike last year. There was a Godard, though. That guy's gotta be geriatric, genius or no. Someday, before I die, I'm going to rent a villa on the Riviera and go to every screening, maybe even take a walk down the Croisette, Leonard Zelig style.

I need to get back to watching films, like I did before the Interruptnum. My organic cinema has entertained and edified me for a time, but now its getting a little fucked up. Like a David Lynch doublebill at the drive-in. Only more opaque (but still baroque), more twisted, and even more fucked up. I need the normative nod of a Takashi Miike movie to straighten me out.

Gotta renew my membership at the Bytowne. Should I remain loyal to my $30 DVD player? It plays Divx files, which proved handy during the Grand Piractical days, prior to the Interruptnum. Or should I toss it aside and go Tru-Blu-ray, all the time? Maybe I should show a little more loyalty to the $30 DVD spinner. I'm still mourning the death of my 1979 Panasonic VHS top-loader. I couldn't count the number of movies I watched on that thing between 1981 and 2004. It went everywhere with me -- always the priority (and primordial) passenger in the Idler. We bonded together over many a beer-sodden night. It began to break down around 1999. I took it apart and "repaired" it. Around 2002, it once again ceased to operate. I completely stripped it down and at least got the arcana of the videotape spools to work. Robbed of its exoskeleton, it was almost as entertaining to watch the inner architecture at work as it was to watch the movie. Like a fleshless Frankenstein's monster, stuck between Life and Death, it carried me through to 2003/04, when I finally graduated to the versatile disc. It was deprived of a proper burial. Tossed into an East Vancouver dumpster. It deserved better. What could I do? My Chinese landlord (as ostracized as I was in the middle of the Sikh ghetto) told me I couldn't leave my garbage on the curb. For a year, I had to pack my rubbish into the Idler and drive around Vancouver looking for an unguarded dumpster. "Hey, watchout, the cook's out back having a smoke, let's try the one behind the Denny's". Thanks XXXX, for your altruism and general pity. I wonder what my students that year would have thought of that, if they thought of anything at all beyond "sir, who is the Bishop Rick you've been talking about?" I deserved them, and they deserved me. Simple as that. But the 1979 Panasonic deserved better. Never again would its clockwork hydraulics, by then completely open to inspection, catapult its contents across the expanse of whatever Grub Street garret or domestic den of sin that I happened to live within. I got pretty good at catching the tapes when they were spat out -- at the very least I tried to block the shot, Guy Carbonneau style.

Yes, I need to get the cable out, and get the DVDs in. I hear you, SC, on your film noir and Japanese classics of postwar domesticity. I have a sense of what I'm missing. But for me, 1960 is as far back as I go. When the French really get into the game. Shit, they invented the stuff. And the question I always had to ask myself when I watched contemporary Japanese films was -- "what the fuck has happened to these people". Nothing is taboo. Complete lack of restraint. And I love every minute of it. Hiroshima happened. The lack of the Judeo-Christian ethic happened. With no Original one to perpetually atone for, they are free to make up their own sins. And as far as a filmic answer to Hiroshima, they had to go beyond a man in a suit. But that too, as far as I know, which isn't a hell of a lot, was part of a Gargantuan tradition. The new Japanese horror genre plays around with those traditions as well. Miike's Gozu bored me for while on first viewing, until the end. All I need is one extraordinary image or sequence, and a film is a keeper for me.

Cinema may be dying and/or morphing into other forms. But, from 1960 to around the middle of the last decade, I have enough to catch up on. If I can find a little World Enough and Time.

And I think I'm gonna stay true to my $30 spinner special.

Faster Pussycat!

My feet are a little sore today. I hope its not the gout. It's become more of a democratic disease, I hear. Or maybe I need to get the Royal Touch. Problem is, there aren't many Kings around anymore, unless I go track down Garry Galley or Brian Kilrea. The Shawarma King left my neighbourhood a couple years ago. The Garlic King could do it -- he can do anything.

Just saw the old woman's cat across the street. Outrageously obese, it was basking in the antediluvian sunshine.

It got me to thinking about cats. About the ones I've had as pets. I've always been partial to black cats. For what reason I can't say. I've had a black cat with green eyes. I've had a black cat with copper eyes. I even talked my girlfriend into calling her by that name, Copper. And then she talked me into getting some kind of jungle cat that cut me up real good, but that's another story.

Black cats. If you're going to have a cat, it might as well be black. They appear to be more intelligent, more independent, more interesting and yes, more occult. I've always had an attraction/repulsion dialectic going on with the feline. Whether in women or cats.

Is there any better discussion of perversity than in Poe's The Black Cat? So brief, yet no writer has anatomized the principle of perversity so succinctly.

Both of my black cats died the same way. Both died of the same disease that interrupted my life.

I think I'm gonna go down to the SPCA and get me a black cat again.

What's he Building in There?

I had Thai food for lunch today. Might have been some bad pad thai, or else the green curry is taking itself too literally. I can't work. Might as well cram in a post.

Gord Downie's "East Wind" is playing on one of my seldom-used 'Galaxie' channels. Radio on the TV. Or TV On The Radio. I'm not sure. All I know is that this phenomenon is part of the cable company's last hurrah with regards to me. If I wasn't getting channels I'm not paying for, the box would have been yanked a year ago. As it is, I'm digging out the rabbit ears again very soon. Until I can't stand a steady diet of Mansbridge, Strombo and Paikin anymore. At least I'd be rid of those annoying time shift channels. Especially the Can/West ones. Damn, I missed 'a very special episode' of "Two and a Half Men". Oh, I can still catch it on the Regina feed. (Which reminds me, the canada.com email linked to this blog doesn't work -- in the highly unlikely event that somebody has sent an email there, I can't access it). I'll have to get used to losing the puck behind the fuzzy gauze, but I'll still be able to hear Bob Cole stumble deeper into senility. But, aside from hockey, I don't really watch TV anymore. Its not going to make it to the other side of the levee. And I'm getting tired of the turf war between the providers. Fuck em both.

"East Wind" is growing on me. And while I don't normally pay attention to words in music, the simple lyrics in this song are brilliant. The laziest wind. It doesn't go around you, it goes through you. It reminds me of our neighbour when I was growing up. Angus was a fur trapper, and the grand old bugger died just about a year ago. As the kid next door with a curious inerest, I was anointed the unofficial curator of the museum lodge that took up most of his back yard. I could run over to his cabin and watch while he skinned a muskrat. No better juvenile education than that. He did his own taxidermy. The one room cabin was a Kunst-Cabinet of baroque bestiality. Leering lemmings, bemused beavers, and the supreme specimen, the giant, antlered moose head that appeared over his front door. Abandon all hope, ye rodents who enter. The air was pungent, thanks to the seemingly endless carafes of castor oil, and the lingering odour of carcasses recently turned inside out. Every winter he would condemn the east wind -- the worst wind, no matter what direction it was coming from.

Square Corner was talking about unreturned CDs the other day. Reminds me of Cousine. While he was working for a big-box electronics store many years ago, he needed a disc to demo stereo equipment. So I gave him Jethro Tull's "Songs from the Wood", as I wasn't all that fond of it -- irregardless, I still wanted it back. Cousine claimed a customer stole it. $20 down the drain. A pitcher and a half of beer, back then. It got added to the darts/Ping Pong/Statis Pro football/Backgammon/tennis/Trivial Pursuit tab. I don't remember ever engaging with him without some significant dough on the line. The more sloshed we got, the more significant it became. A little while ago, Galaxie was playing a song from the wood. Once Ian Anderson's flute kicked in, not to mention his voice, the album cover suddenly forced its way into my consciousness. I wonder whose CD player that thing is spinning around in these days. Or maybe its sitting over at The Turning Point, and I can enact a happy reunion. I suppose I shouldn't complain -- since then, my pirated CD collection has grown substantially. I had to do something while I was building my levee in the Sikh ghetto.

Anyway, back to the subject. During the last few weeks, during my walkabouts, I've been running into a bizarre old man. One day, as I watched Les Glorieux beat the Capitals, he was in the tavern, his backed turned to the game. He was hunched over his laptop computer, oblivious to everything, with an omnipresent and never empty pint of beer placed in front. He would get up, painfully slow, every 15 minutes or so, and go outside to smoke a rolled cigarette. Maybe it was a pipe. I might even have seen this character before the Interrputnum. Right in that bar, at that very table. Seeing him again, I still couldn't tell if he was a bum, or some geriatric genius that has been exiled to the margins of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Or perhaps he had hermitted himself, far away from the grumbling hive.

The other day, I ran into him again. For about the seventh or eighth time since the evening in the pub. I had just got off the bus, still reeling from my encounter with the fat man. It looked like he was freshly emerged from the library. I was heading in, he was heading out. From time to time, I duck into the discard bookstore at the library. I walked away with four stout hardcovers for less than $5. Square Corner would have been proud of me. My bookshelves are getting full -- the three big bookshelves that my Father made in his workshop, like most of the contents of my apartment. Its hard to imagine that now. I remember asking him to make those for me, such a short time ago. To have them, just in case. I had no idea what was coming, and I can never replace them -- they are priceless to me. Someday, I'm going to read all the books on those shelves. When there is World Enough and Time. I'm still trying to evolve into more of a Biblophagist.

I saw the subject again today. After the curry and pad thai, it was off to Popeye's to procure more powder for my daily protein punch. I also had to get change. My wallet was refreshingly full after my fellow Royal, over the cornucopia of the curry, had given me my share of the winnings from one of our hockey pools. On the way to Popeye's, I had passed by a paraplegic busker playing music on a laptop. I told him I'd doubleback with some twonees. I went down to Popeye's, paid cash for my jug of protein powder, and came back to drop off the promised coins. Who do I run into again, but this character. No doubt headed to his table at the tavern, tobacco and laptop in hand. And he'll resume his hunch over the laptop. And I wonder.

What the hell is he building in there?