Beau Miles in The Backyard Adventurer:

My Africa trip encouraged me to unlearn the habits of information overload. Two years of preparations went mostly out the door as soon as I landed on the giant continent. It turns out the key was sponging up the intricacies of a place with an entirely different set of rules instigated by people with an entirely similar set of humanisms. While catching a bus might be different in the way you get on, pay for and get off, the bus driver has a distinctly similar set of attributes to her Manhattan counterpart. In the same way you can read people with some time and attention, you can read the landscape. Heading in as many different directions as I needed to and trusting the first, second or third person I asked about any given thing was the main way that information flowed into the life force of that long expedition. People trumped maps, guidebooks and the internet, allowing me to be informed, just enough. A lack of knowledge loads up the venture with even doses of the unknown, which works well for me, and anxiety, which seems bad but is actually useful to an adventurer.

I have been thinking and talking a lot about risk, anxiety, growth, and travel lately, and this passage sums up a lot of it quite nicely: we need doses of the unknown to grow and thrive, and COVID, in eliminating travel, has robbed us of a significant wellspring.

When I think of the really great travel memories I carry with me, they are all the result of the happenstancery Miles writes about: looking for a movie theatre in South Korea, trying to find the circus in Munich, searching for long-lost relatives in Croatia, getting lost in Osaka.

Recent times have served to recast “doses of the unknown” as bogeymen: bone fractures, tumour growth, bad scans, death, emptiness. No wonder I’m emerging confused and anxious.

Clearly I need to fall in love with the unknown again.

My Tradescantia Alba, purchased on my birthday in early April, seems to be doing well in the front window at 100 Prince Street. It’s about to bloom.

The new retail packaging for Lil’ Darlings vegan sausages hit the shelves this week. I’ve been assured it will be possible to buy them at locations other than Founders’ Hall in the days and weeks to come.

I Was a Teenage Communist, a 1982 sketch from SCTV, is from an era of the show when it was firing on all cylinders: terrific attention to detail, fine writing, brilliant makeup and costuming, and pitch-perfect satire.

Although it’s a send-up of 1950s American paranoia, it’s remarkable how the broad strokes of the sketch mirror my own experiences as a rebellious student just a few years after it aired: I clearly remember a night in a smoky rock ‘n’ roll bar where I was befriended by a transcendent agitator who later went on to work as a translator for Granma in Cuba. She was full of infectious revolutionary fervour, and I was buying what she was selling.

If I’m any guide, winning young hearts and minds is surprisingly easy.

Spotted in the back of a 1983 oven placed at the curb on Prince Street for next week’s large garbage removal.

While trying to help Oliver find new shoes, I came across a pair for myself. Bucketfeet Save the Bees shoes, by artist Laurel54. They arrived this morning.

Something I haven’t read much if anything about as a side-effect of COVID-19 is the death of cash as a way of paying for things.

I have $60 in my wallet that’s been there since, what, Christmas? 

For many years I kept cash in my wallet because there were a handful of places that didn’t have payment machines: for the longest time Tai Chi Gardens was cash only, as was the sushi place Monsoon. And the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market was always generally a cash-only marketplace, although a couple of vendors allowed you to pay with square.

Today? Nothing. There’s absolutely no need to keep cash in my wallet at all.

We achieved a cashless society without even noticing.

Costas Halavrezos, spice merchant and former siren of the airwaves, has resuscitated his email newsletter, and least for an issue.

I have long enjoyed the 1980 Christopher Cross song Ride Like the Wind. Listening to it this morning I realized that one of the reasons I like it so much is the backing vocals by the estimable Michael McDonald (he of the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and a successful solo career).

Oliver and I listened to the song this morning in the car: McDonald’s contribution–we counted–amounts to only four utterances of “Such a long way to go…” Nonetheless, without those the song wouldn’t be as delightful as it is.

Like salt, sometimes all you need is a little, but without that little the food doesn’t taste nearly as good.

(Clip from The Very Best of Christopher Cross, 2002)

What went unreported in this 2003 post about dinner out in Bilbao was that the night ended with the poovalanche of all poovalanches in the Oliver department of the family.

What Catherine would chime in with at this point, were this a dinner party and not a blog post (and were she still alive), would be that, in my inebriated state, I was of no help at all, becoming obsessed with side issues that had nothing to do with the central challenge of sluices of poo leaking out everywhere.

There were poovalanches before that night in Bilbao—the great Christmas Poovalanche of 2000, in The Gap at Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto comes to mind—and poovalanches after that night in Bilbao, but that night in Bilbao, at least in my sodden memory, was as poovalanche as it ever got.