The yellow dahlias keep on growing in our front yard.

Two years ago last night I plucked myself up and went to my first improv class. Two years later I’m still going, Every week. It’s helped me so, so much in so, so many ways (including leading my heart to Lisa’s door). I owe a great debt to Laurie Murphy for all of this. And to my fellow players, and their yes&ing.

The 5th Wave coffee shop closed up its Queen Street location last week and is relocating to the spot on Great George Street formerly occupied by Coffee Plus. Stopping in at 5th Wave in the morning had become a morning habit on the way back from a cycle run to school: friendly staff, good coffee, laptop-friendly tables (with plenty of power outlets), clean washroom and a good soundtrack. I look forward to their resurrection closer to home.

We took a long walk on the beach a few weeks ago—leaping over a gully and not wanting to leap back the other way meant for a much longer walk that we’d planned—and we encountered scores of woolly bear caterpillars along the way. They were on the beach. On the road. On pathways. Everywhere.

I shot a video of one of them walking toward me on the beach.

Three observations this season:

• We turned the heat on in the house for the winter heating season on October 24, 2023; last year it was October 9, 2022 (compare to Ton).
• The first snow of the season was today, October 30, 2023 (in 2019 it was November 8).
• By lucky coincidence, today was also the day we got the winter tires put on both of our vehicles (repeating my success in 2021).

Here’s the weather warning that appeared on my phone this morning when I woke up:

The chorus of Feeling of Home, new from The East Pointers:

Soul’s invisible, a bit unknown, a little tragic
On a lonely boat, where the longing never ends
Here, then we’re gone, we can’t do this alone
Carrying on, we’re still looking for that feeling of home

The “feeling of home” has been much on my mind, as Lisa and I reimagine together the blue-house-with-the-red-roof to be ours, an exercise in crafting a feeling as much as it is about organizing, painting and rearranging. It’s big, making space—physical, emotional, spiritual—in this house that has been home, in one guise, to me for so long (as long as I can remember living somewhere).

It is a welcoming embrace to Lisa and L., a finding of nooks where stillness can be found, a stanching of the uproot, all of that.

But it’s also about giving myself permission to find hope, future, joy, in a space that was, for so many years, a place of vigilance, expectation, unease, fear, grief.

It is welcoming myself home too.

We get tied in knots, and we try so hard
And it takes everything that we got
And it can breaks our hearts

There used to be a Freshii a few doors up from my office, and it became an occasional lunch spot.

At Freshii, you ordered at the cash register, gave your name, and picked up your order with your name printed on it. The first time I went in, I gave my name as Pete, a nickname I abide a select few others using for me, but a name I’d never ever called myself before.

When I went in the next week, I felt an obligation to consistency to again give my name as Pete (“hold on, buddy — last week you told us your name was Pete, and now suddenly you’re Peter — what gives?!”; clearly I’m very conflict-averse).

Subsequently I extended this Pete-ing to all similar orderings (what if someone from Freshii switched jobs?).

Today I set myself free: I realized I could use any name I wanted to order my doppio macchiato at Starbucks.

And so, for a brief flash, today I became Jaz.

“Doppio macchiato for Jaz… Jaz…”

Why do I spell it with one z? Who knows!

What will I become next time?

I’m in the process of stitching the Reinventorium back together, and part of that is bringing order to the chaos of the scattered archive of letterpress jobs I’ve created over the last 13 years.

Heretofore I’ve had a set of drawers with things randomly stacked; Lisa secured me portable file folder hampers, with rails for legal hanging folders, and we spend the last week organizing larger items into these, and smaller items into a set of photo boxes. It was a good opportunity to see the breadth of things I’ve printed, from business cards to coffee bags to broadsides.

In 2009, as part of a series of interviews about Prince Edward Island’s history of controlling carbon emissions, I recorded an interview with Kirk Brown.

In the blog post I wrote to point to the interview, I wrote:

Kirk was the Director of Research for the Institute of Man and Resources, moving to Prince Edward Island after working with the Ontario Research Foundation and, before that, with Exxon.  He knows as much about Prince Edward Island’s energy needs as anyone you’ll ever meet.

And that proved true.

Kirk died last week; his obituary is a loving paean from a granddaughter for a life well-lived. It starts:

Charles Alexander Kirkland Brown, 17 years old, boards a train in Vaudreuil in 1953, going into Montreal. He notices a young woman boarding at the same station. “Who’s that?” He elbows his friend in the ribs, eyes not leaving the girl. “That? That’s J’Nan Bishop!” Kirk, always calm in a crisis, looks around the train car. He has to get her attention, make an impression. What’s going to impress a girl like this? His heart beats too fast, palms sweaty. Time to gamble. He grabs a paper cup and shoves it down the back of her dress. “Hey!” J’Nan, fierce and confident, turns to give him a piece of her mind. She sees a young man, wiry and strong, with dark curly hair, sparkling brown eyes, and a mischievous smile. “Well, hello!” she says. They get off at the same station. 

So much of what was good and holy about Prince Edward Island in the 1970s and 1980s as an alternative energy leader is due Kirk’s wisdom and leadership. His words in 2009 remain a wise pointer forward. He will be missed.

Many years ago my brother Steve and my mother and I drove around Lake Ontario. I cannot recall why we were driving around Lake Ontario, and why in that particular combination: I cannot trace the impulse to an occasion nor a destination. But we did it. One of the things we did to keep ourselves occupied—it’s a big lake, and so a long drive—was a game we invented, a game I wrote about 20 years ago:

The challenge was for one of us to name a person of some renown, and for the others to concoct a course through their social network that would allow them to have a telephone call taken by this person. For example, I said “Bill Clinton.” Steve responded by naming his friend Dave, an editor for the CBC Morning News in Halifax, who worked with Henry Champ, Washington Bureau Chief for CBC Newsworld who, in turn, would probably know someone who could get him to Clinton. Not the strongest case, I agree, but you get the idea.

I love this sort of connection. Not for the standard-issue “networking” possibilities, at least not entirely, but rather for the simple delight of exploring the latticeworks that connect us all.

In that spirit, here is my connection to Dave Eggers:

In the spring of 2005 I took a leap and booked a flight to Copenhagen to attend my first reboot conference. At the conference’s opening drinks at Admiral Gjeddes Gaard I met Jyri Engeström over a beer. A few days later, I heard Jyri speak, which I summarized here as:

Jyri Engeström’s talk, titled Blind Men’s Baseball, where he talked about bringing the kind of presence tools we have on the web into mobile devices to add a sort of “peripheral vision” to the mobile experience.

Jyri went on to co-found Jaiku, which afforded a lot of that “peripheral vision” in a real mobile application, and I was intrigued enough to become a user and a developer, and to keep in touch with Jyri from time to time.

Many years later—Jaiku got folded into Google and Jyri went on to all manner of other interesting things—Jyri became partners in life and work with Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, and also one-of-many-interesting-pursuits.

One of Caterina’s pursuits is a new podcast, Ingenious, and one of her first guests is Dave Eggers, which she writes about here:

Dave and I go way back. We worked together circa 1996-8, at Salon.com, one of the very first online media publishers, which published, and still publishes, thinky articles on society and culture. They also host thoughtful online conversations and civil discourse. Again, it was an amazing time to be online.

Now I’m on the board of McSweeneys, the publishing company that Dave also founded. It publishes books and magazines, old media. So Dave and I have invested a lot of our energy into making places and spaces for writers doing creative work, finding an audience and getting paid. But these are fraught times for writers. The writers in Hollywood are on strike, AI is taking their jobs, teachers are saying the high school essay is dead. You’re here too and you’ve seen it—there’s a lot of dread to go around. Think we’re reactionary luddites? I don’t think so. Techno-optimists turned tech skeptics, maybe. I think we’ve all become a lot more wary since our salad days.

In any case, there’s a lot of these values and thinking and ideation in this podcast. It is a special episode because Dave and I are old friends, and share a lot of the same hopes for the humans. So give it a listen!

But this really isn’t a post about how I could get Dave Eggers on the phone—could I get Dave Eggers on the phone?—but rather a post about how I bought Dave Eggers’ newest book, The Eyes and The Impossible, this morning from The Bookmark.

The book is available in two editions: a regular hardbound version for $25, and a special edition with a wood binding for $35. I think you can figure out which edition I bought. But if not:

I bought the book because Catarina recommended it, because I loved the book’s trailer narrated by Ethan Hawke, and because almost everything I’ve ever read or watched that comes from the mind of Dave Eggers has delighted me.

I just finished reading myself the first chapter, aloud, and I am delighted:

I turn I turn I turn before I lie to sleep and I rise before the Sun.

I sleep inside and sleep outside and have slept in the hollow of a thousand-year-old tree. When I sleep I need warmth I need quiet I need freedom from sound. When I sleep I dream of mothers and clouds clouds are messengers of God-and I dream of pupusas for I love pupusas and eat them with gusto.

I am a dog called Johannes and I have seen you. I have seen you in this park, my home. If you have come to this park, my vast green and windblown park by the sea, I have seen you. I have seen everyone who has been here, the walkers and runners and bikers and horse-riders and the Bison-seekers and the picnickers and the archers in their cloaks. When you have come here you have come to my home, where I am the Eyes.

The woodbound copy at The Bookmark is sold out (you can order another, though), but the hardbound is still in stock, and I second the recommendation.