I have been listening to Bruce Cockburn’s 1996 album The Charity of Night today, and remembering how much I love it.

The album opens with Night Train, a song that, as Cockburn explains in this live set, was written under the influence of absinthe. It is among my favourite of his canon.

My personal experience with absinthe, somewhat predictably, lies in Olle’s kitchen in Copenhagen. Unlike Cockburn, I didn’t get a song out of it, but it was a good day.

Pomplamoose’s Extreme Ways ft. MOBY takes ft. to a whole new level of recursive minimalism.

From the liner notes:

There’s nothing quite so surreal as covering a Moby song WITH Moby.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, Centennial Nissan in Charlottetown has just opened an on-premises carwash. And it’s not one of those new-age touchless ones, either: it has real 1976-style spinning brushes that attack the dirt off your vehicle.

By far the biggest innovation, though, is that the vacuums beside the carwash—vacuums that have the power of a jet engine—are free to use, on the honour system.

I now have a very clean car.

Floyd Buell, who died last week, sold us our first house, in 1994, on the Kingston Road.

I originally found Floyd because he was the realtor for a house on the Colville Road with an asking price of $33,000, a price that, even back then, seemed impossibly affordable. That house—which turned out to have been built from the rubble of the old house next door—turned out not to suit us, but Floyd became our realtor in the process.

He was a kind and patient man, and showed us scores of houses in the $30K to $50K range, most of which—no fault of his—were desperately horrible houses: basements filled with water, walls smashed, hyper-pink bedrooms; we saw it all, from Emyvale to Donaldston to Mount Buchanan and all points between. Floyd never faltered, despite knowing his commission wasn’t likely to top $1,000.

Eventually we looked at 1360 Kingston Road, and we were ready to buy. And even then it was a multi-back-and-forth offer-counter process followed by an unexpected Supreme Court Quieting of the Title. Floyd was in for the duration.

We loved that house for the six years we lived in it

Floyd will be missed.

The Guardian published my Letter to the Editor this morning:

The Charlottetown area has benefited greatly over the last year from improvements to active transportation infrastructure: there is still much work to be done, but it has never been easier to safely move about the city by foot, wheelchair, or bicycle.

One area that needs much more attention, however, is the last 50 feet of the journey: there’s no point in having a lovely, modern, paved, separated, shared pathway connecting home and destination if the destination isn’t itself barrier-free.

Which means not only bicycle racks, but also includes power doors, step-free access, clear wayfinding, and accessible washrooms.

This is one realm where we citizens can act directly, spending our dollars at businesses that are welcoming to everyone, and reminding those that aren’t that we’re no longer willing to stand idle while some of us are excluded on the other side of needless barriers.

Our neighbours have a millstone in their yard, and I noticed this morning that there was a tiny flower growing up out of it. It’s amazing what can grow where.

Our former neighbour Murray Todd died at age 32 last week.

When we moved into this house in 2000, Murray was 11 years old, a fresh-faced, friendly kid who always said hello.

Murray had a hard life, punctuated by loss, addictions, and involvement with the justice system. It’s not always easy to love people so overtaken, but they’re the ones we need to love the most.

You will be missed, neighbour.

I extended my haircut cadence to 110 days this time around, and took the opportunity to up my fashion game, with the arrival of a new Fisherman Sweater in a decidedly-more-autumnal-than-usual shade for me.

Facebook, which I have rejoined, at least for the moment, for reasons of widower-support, has been aggressively marketing apparel at me for weeks now–I imagine as a result of an otherwise imperceptible hover over a kaftan or printer’s smock at some point–and, I am somewhat ashamed to say, I fell victim. To my credit, the sweater is made in Canada from recycled materials, so while the messenger was evil, the sweater is not.

The happiness is genuine and pure.

From the Counterculture issue of Volume magazine, from a piece by C-Lab about hacking:

As a form of countercultural resistance, hacking makes no claims to ideological coherence. Hacking is inherently impure, working as it does in the gaps within structures. It takes advantage of the piecemeal nature of the most seemingly-unified organizations, thereby complicating the easy polarities of engagement and refusal. It does not work to establish a coherent agreement based on an existing logic, nor does it simply negate and replace an order. Instead, it temporarily inhabits a network just long enough to discover and implement new possibilities. By problematizing the notion of engagement, hacking can be seen as both destructive and constructive, both revolutionary (creating interruptions by inserting new designs into technological systems) and evolutionary (driving the development of the system forward).

At its core, this is a restatement of what I more simply laid out as my mission:

To create small moments where people can see things they’ve never seen before.

The birds were alive and musical as I was pottering around with my bicycle in the back yard yesterday.