I named tonight’s blog posting after an album by ‘Why?’ because I cannot stop listening to it and have been doing so the past few days, check this one out.

It is with great lamenting and pleasure that I am recounting this past week, as I was given the oppourtunity to spend time with a childhood friend for a day or two [our visit was however shortlived as she was traveling to Cairo the following days after] and then back home to Ottawa. For the time I did get to spend with her, it was a blustery and very wintery Tuesday that we partook on an almost nomadic journey [due to the amassed snow coming down] to an electic part of my city- it is considered a more artistic sector [though it has been invaded by what we now derrogatorily call ‘yuppies’, Iam unilaterally liberal myself with the term].

And so it goes… the Tuesday we had taken the train and shared stories, as she is just as as much of a nomad herself, she has traveled anywhere [this at times has inspired an envy in me] and she introduced me to some new ‘tunage’ to use an appropriated term- like the Soviet/ Moscow colored tonal sounds of Gogol Bordello, a synth-rap and almost spoken word electronic mix that was ‘Why?’ and an invasion of rockabilly grit known as ‘The Cramps’. As childhood friends and as neighbors [being that we are only two houses away] I now share similar tastes with hers as mine have begun to develop a bit more, she gave me more of an ‘education’. So we sat in a small cafe adorned with an old world charm [mainly because of its British phone booth which stood just around the corner] and she ate macaroons, me a bran muffin and we watched out the antiquated wooden windows on barstool chairs and sipped coffee.

Across the street was a small 70s style cottage-house with what I would call modern originality, its number had scribbled underneath it in black and white paint ‘cottage’ cheese. Skycrapers of downtown were visible at a distance with an almost eerie daylight glow amongst the overcast skies and wintery vistas of snow. We both appreciated the coffee as our feet were cold from getting lost after walking 2 blocks to find the small hidden coffee room. My best friend enticed me to try a ‘pistachio’ macaroon, which I am delighted to say was truly not entirely as bad as I had anticipated, the taste was almost nutty but creamy and tangy like citrus. From the windows, an old 1950s red bicycle with white trim stared back at us and I can only imagine how delightedly antique this sounds, but it is true.

There was a few quotes I wrote down from our conversations that stuck with me and they were simply too good for me to pass up from recording, I love this arts sector in town, as does my friend and we feel at home there despite the new invasion there is a “creating of your own society, because it is your own individual soul, you’re sick of the society you are living in”, we talked about the inspiration we feel about this part of town, the emotions it evokes within you. I feel more and more strongly about particular places I go now in my city because they truly feel like home and I am still discovering them. Despite the dangers inherent in venturing downtown at night, I am allured by it, I feel a draw towards it where I want to walk alone and discover because the city is altogether different at night. I feel like the more I discover the more I evolve.

After we had finally warmed our feet [due to our getting lost trying to find the tucked-away coffee room] we ventured to a few of the shops in the sector run by smaller private merchants. At a head shop I purchased some incense which all of my clothes now smell like [I now love Nag champa] and we stumbled upon some small pots imported from India filled with a substance called ‘gamesh’ [which to me was reminiscient at least in name to the Epic of Gilgamesh]. The pots’ substance was an amalgam of essential oils, a salve of sorts for the skin which was all natural and was scented differently in each stone hand-carved pot. They smells were mesmerizing.

We both agreed that “Instead of buying you material goods, I’ll just alter your reality” [do not ask why this does or doesn’t make sense] and that every umbrella wants to be free.

After exploring some vintage clothing shops and enjoying some Oolong tea- as we kept bounding from Cafe to Cafe due to the weather. We braved it. We returned to her place to hang and chat and she decided to bestow half of her CD collection to me to borrow while she was away at home in Ottawa those of which included: Panda Bear, Antony & The Johnsons, Broken Social Scene, The Magnetic Zeros, Friend, Final Fantasy, Chad VanGaalen, Deerhunter and Beirut. I look forward to leaping into these albums soon. Now my best friend is somewhere in Tel Aviv enjoying the weather and probably swimming in the Dead Sea. At least we also had a chance to spy on some nice-looking gentleman occassionally passing the cafe windows, I felt younger again as we giggled, her at 23 and me at almost 21, watching good-looking men walk by. There was one we would have probably fought over, he was wearing a nice hat and beautiful shoes.

It was this week that I reconvened my obsession for Egyptology, and I found it rather funny that upon a trip back home on the train, I heard two men in their thirties at the end of their work day, holding onto the rails [because of the mass sardine type arrangement on the train]. The one man talked about how his wife was a teacher, she hated hearing about dinosaurs because a grade two in her class wouldn’t stop talking about them, he was obsessed and he wanted to be a ‘painteantologist’ or rather paleontologist, though the man joked that he was convinced the boy would just rather paint the dinosaurs, the other man responded that he thought that job was ridiculous, that and egyptology. A piece of me died. Though I am sure nothing will get in the way of this grade two boy becoming a painter of dinosaurs or a bone digger-upper, I am certain I can still love my mummies, hieroglyphs and Tutenkhammen artifacts.

So now I sit alone with a gigantic pile of sketchbooks, a Palahniuk novel, a room smelling strongly of incense and three huge piles of cds on my floor I can’t help thinking that I have a lot of work to do, but I would rather be out exploring the town….

I am surmised to say that the large-chain bookstore I entered in today caused me some great pain today as well, despite my enthusiasm for poring through some art books I was shocked to only find two small shelves mostly filled with modern pop art Warhol and comic book art. Though I am in no means trying to criticize the artistic methods of the comic genre, I would only wish that this particular section had been expanded to include a bit more surealism, renaissance art and impressionist art… one can dream I guess. You can’t always get the entire L’ouvre in every bookstore. Though I wish I could. It was this and the Egyptology section at this bookstore which will remain unnamed that disappointed me the most. Curse you..

Despite this I shall now venture to bed with the poem ‘Ozymandias’ in my head and a few tunes by Martha Wainwright.

Adieu and Goodnight