And No Fish Tacos Were Had: Wandering, Disappointment, and Paying Attention

Yesterday, the Palinode and I set out on a fish taco adventure, or at least we tried to.



Not those kind of fish tacos.

*ahem*



Our intent was to go to Taco Del Mar to try their fish tacos, but it turned out that Taco Del Mar was busy being transmogrified into Mad Ta c o, a restaurant I can never go to now because of its overwhelming kerning issues. Really bad kerning and a blatant disregard for design give me a case of the sads.



Also, no fish tacos could be had! The universe obviously hated us, or at least it hated the Palinode. I was fine with it, because I won't eat fish tacos on principle. Cooked fish smells like a toilet to me, and I can think of several things that make better taco-filler.



So, we started wandering.

One thing I like about not having a car is that you are more given to adventure. If we had a car, we would have just gotten back into it and driven somewhere else, but, as it was, we had just gotten out of a cab and weren't about to pay twice as much to go nowhere we wanted to go, so we set off on foot.

We didn't have a map. We didn't consult our iPhones. We just wandered in a general southwesterly direction through 1970s suburbs in the hopes of running into a Chapters book store.

We didn't choose not to consult our gadgets. It just escaped us to do so. I think we were supposed to wander and forget for a few hours. People used to do that.

In the 1990s, I had a pile of magazine articles I'd saved about ideas I wanted to think about, and one of the articles was about just this kind of wandering. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I would secretly pack a snack and set out on my own to get lost somewhere. I often ended up walking or biking right out of the city and would find myself watching the highway from a farmer's field.



We ended up in a large, empty field we didn't recognize next to a highway we didn't recognize, just like it was 1983.



And then we ended up on a wide, empty street we didn't recognize next to another road we didn't recognize.

It felt good. If you don't know where you are, no one else probably does, either. You're free.



We ended up in the parking lot of dying mall at the edge of town where a Montana's restaurant vacuumed us up and pushed as much fat and sugar on us as it could. Their menu defies any adherence to an ethical sense of the social contract.



Before the food we ate had a chance to make us feel bad about ourselves and society in general, we took comfort in coffee and our cool booth.





I am going to write a book called How to Take Awkward Self-Portraits and Endear Yourself to Waitresses.



Also? Montana's should stamp your distended gut with its logo on your way out. It would create a more fully integrated experience. Moo. I am now a diabetic cow.



We found Chapters! I passed on buying the book of poetry I really want again — Anne Carson's Nox — and I don't know why. It looks delicious.





We had walked so far that I could still feel my thigh muscles going pop pop pop while we drank our coffee.

I was besieged by the feeling that I wanted to buy something, but I wanted nothing in particular. It's unsettling to want to spend money with no object in mind. It makes me feel insecure and shiftless. This is what places like Chapters do, and I know that, but the feeling sneaks in and tries to convince me that I need to by a pad of paper in the shape of a butterfly or sheets of fake chalkboard that claim they probably won't stick to my walls unless I repaint them.



It is important to stay critical. Your attention will be stolen and your life will be lost with all of the looking at things that are not actually related to you as though they are related you.





Thinking back, I should have just bought that book of Anne Carson poetry, though. Sometimes denial is just masochism.

A Jaw-Dropping Miracle of Meat and Electricity

One of the first conversations I ever had with the Palinode, a conversation which occurred over seven years before we finally started dating, was about books.



I may have been engaged to another man at the time, and I may have been fooling around with the friend who introduced the Palinode and I — I was, shall we say, a lover and not a fighter in those days — but damn if that Palinode didn't seem like a fine human being, and one of my tests for fineness back then was to ask about books. If a person hemmed, hawed, or looked in any way confused by the question, they were deemed Not Fine.

"What book should I read next above all others?" I asked him.

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian," the Palinode answered without hesitation.

And he was, indeed, deemed to be Very Fine.

More than seven years after that conversation, we dated, and almost a year after that, we were married, and about a month or two into our marriage, we were sitting around in our apartment together talking about books again when he suddenly looked like he'd remembered something important.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I just remembered one of my favourite passages in fiction," he said. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would love to," I said.

I expected him to get up off the floor to find the book the passage was in, but no.

"It's from Blood Meridian, pages 51 to 53," he said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to remember that kind of thing, and then his eyes looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and then he looked at me and recited this section of Blood Meridian from memory:

The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant. ¹

OH MY GOD, I thought in my head.

I stared at him in silence.

"Oh, you didn't like it," he said.

"No, I loved it. That was like incredible poetry."

I remembered our conversation about that book from eight years before and decided that I had just landed in one of three situations:

a) This was a sign that I had married the right person.
b) I was in way over my head, and he should totally divorce me for someone who knows stuff.
c) I had married either a robot or a highly intelligent alien-human hybrid sent to infiltrate the species.

Ten-and-a-half years later, a full eighteen-and-a-half years since we met, I think the correct answer was A. He still knows a ludicrous amount of information — really, his brain is a jaw-dropping miracle of meat and electricy — but he's kind enough not to mock me for having trouble remembering the word for butter, and that, my friends, is love.

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¹ Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. 1985. p. 51–53.

You Should Probably Enter To Win A Free Photo Book From Shutterfly and I, Because They're Darn Spanky

Despite the fact that spring is coming on with all the verve of a snail on quaaludes — I live in Saskatchewan, and WE HAD MORE SNOW LAST NIGHT — I'm starting to feel that energetic thrum moving through me. It happens every spring. I am filled with a near-anxious excitement over new things, whether there are new things happening or not. Of course, I'm lucky this year, because there are actually new things to celebrate. This will save me from manically searching for meaning while I clean out the backs of our closets.

Oh, who am I kidding? I don't clean out the backs of our closets, except for when we move. When we moved last fall, I discovered all the musical instruments from my elementary school music classes and am still fairly certain that I need to learn how to play the recorder, ukulele, and kazoo to some level of proficiency.

Aaaaanyway, on to celebrations, because it's Spring!

My friend Mrs. Wilson just had huge chunk of a boy very recently, and this seems to be the time of year when everyone is having smaller and larger chunks of their own, and so it just seems fitting that there should some spanky birth announcements or photo books to crow about them, which is why — jeebus, my sentences are long today — I am giving away a Shutterfly 8"x8" photo book.

If you would like ONE chance to get your hands on a Shutterfly 8"x8" photo book, do one of the following. If you would like TWO chances to win, do both of the following:

1. Leave a comment on this post. You can tell me how you're going to use the photo book or just say hello if you want to.


2. Post the following tweet on Twitter, complete with hashtag:
   I want to win a Shutterfly photo book - http://tinyurl.com/shutterflyFTW  #shutterflyFTW

I will pick one lucky person at random on April 22nd at midnight using random.org, and then I will announce the winner both here and on Twitter.

So, go forth! Comment and tweet! Your beautiful photobook awaits you.

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Are you a blogger, too? Click here to register for a chance at 50 free announcements!

This post is part of a series sponsored by Shutterfly. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

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UPDATE: And the giveaway winner has been chosen. It is Brahm (alfred lives here)!