Daily Archives: June 10, 2004

And so it ends

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The project is finished at last. Kids will be able to learn the alphabet now, thanks to me and dozens of other dedicated people, even in Canada where they say ‘zed’ instead of ‘zee’. I’m no longer tied to high-speed Internet and expensive hotels. I can go where I want and do what I want. I can devote myself to Jer’s Software Hut and to writing novels.

I had been looking forward to seeing the message all day. There were a couple of last-second crises and some fine-tuning of the product that forced me to extend my stay here another day. That was not unexpected; that’s been the way this project has gone.

I read the message. I sighed in relief. It was over at last. We had made something. I read the message again. I wanted to write everyone on the project and tell them how much I had enjoyed working with them, but I didn’t know what to say. I read the message again. It was very short. I did not feel the rush of joy I had expected. In fact, I felt much like I had driving away from my house for the last time, when I first took to the road.

The project had been an anchor for me both figuratively and literally. It had limited my movement when my life is supposed to be all about movement. It also provided stability, and regular contact with other people. It was my last anchor. Now, if I don’t keep my sail up I will drift. I still have stars to guide me, and ports to pull into, but I blow where the wind takes me and I could easily get lost.

Maybe the rush of joy will be all the stronger later, when the freedom sinks in. I don’t know. When I read that message today the world got bigger. Scary bigger.

Thanks!

Why the Stanley Cup is the Best Trophy in Sports

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Simple rules for trophies:

There can be only one.
The trophy itself must have a history.

There are three big sports in America, and Hockey trying to become the fourth but shooting itself in the foot every time it gets close. Each superbowl you hear that “the blahblahblahs have won the Vince Lombardi Trophy!” Wrong. As anyone from the Czech Republic who has after some struggle mastered the difference between “the” and “a” can tell you, when you say “the” you imply uniqueness. “The Vince Lombardi Trophy” says that there is only one. Pish. They make a new one every year. When a team wins the Superbowl, they get a trinket to display forever. When a team wins the Stanley Cup, they have the trophy only as long as they remain champions.

There are many such trophies. Many of these totems are passed between only two teams, symbols of rivalry and substance of respect. I have a friend with a lump of coal. The challenge every Christmas is to give it to someone else within the circle. If they open the gift, they inherit the coal for the next year. It’s an antitrophy, but the principle applies. There is only one lump of coal, and all in the family know its every fissure. All in the family can recite the entire history of the lump, who got fooled which year and how. It is a great trophy.

The Stanley Cup has history. There was a time no one knew where it was until it turned up in a bar, where it was being used as a spittoon. Better, it has the name of every player on every team that has won the trophy engraved into it. That’s why there’s a little cup and a huge base now. To make room for the history. When a team wins the cup – the cup – they take turns circling the rink with the cup. They hold it over their heads and shout senselessly for their victory lap. But they are holding in their hands the name of every player who has ever done the same thing, and their name will be added soon. Later they will read every name on the cup, and they will get a shiver as they imagine another player, 100 years from now, reading theirs. Once your name is etched into that surface, you are a champion forever.

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Thanks!

Hockey night in Edmonton

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Location: Cedar Park Inn, Edmonton (map)
Miles: 4070.2

There were three things I promised to write about: Robert the quintessential Canadian, ten beers, and Canadian turncoats. Unfortunately, the ‘ten beers’ part has sort of dulled my memories of the other two.

I was at a bar called Mo’s. Mo was my bartender. I saw a barstool and grabbed it. I needn’t have worried. The first of my Rickard’s Reds was quickly on its way. I settled in.

I won’t go into detail; the experience just wasn’t the same. They didn’t cheer when the Flames came out onto the ice. They didn’t sing O Canada with one voice. There was not the same electric anticipation. The passion wasn’t there.

The game began. The first time Florida scored there was significant cheering in the bar. The second time Florida scored there was even more. There was a significant percentage of that bar that preferred seeing the cup melt in Florida than rest in the city down the highway. I thought of them as Canadian turncoats.

That wasn’t really fair, however. Rather it was fair, but I have to recognize that if the Dodgers were playing for the world championship against the Kyoto Carp (I know there’s a Kyoto team, and I know there’s a team named the carp, but it would be an amazing coincidence if there actually were a Kyoto Carp. But I digress.), I would not root for the Dodgers, the team up the road, simply because they were American. But if the world series had been won by Japan for several years in a row, or perhaps more appropriately if baseball was slowly being sucked from its roots and transplanted to China, where there are plenty of potential fans but for the most part they simply don’t understand the sport, and you watch your teams over the years moving far away into strange lands, then perhaps there would be a place for national pride to transcend local rivalries.

For the latter part of the game and some time after, I sat next to Robert. He was middle-aged, a little overweight, and congenial. He had had his head in his hands for much of the third period, so his greying combover was standing up. Not only did he append his questions with “eh?”, he appended his statements of fact. “I have two kids, eh.” “Oh, eh, I couldn’t believe that, eh.” He was a thinking man, though, aware of the world but cautious about expressing his opinion.

I’m pretty sure there was more I wanted to say about him, but then there were the ten beers.

Thanks!

The Road to Edmonton

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Morning came in Calgary and I worked hard right up until checkout time, when I sent an email to Deena (oddly, I think that’s the first time I’ve mentioned her name. She’s the producer on the project I’ve been working on) saying that I would be unreachable for a few hours and I gathered my stuff and quit the room.

Outside is was blowing hard and steady out of the north. I was tempted to drive with the top up again, but while the sky was filled with puffy clouds it didn’t looke like they were going to manage to combine up and amount to anything. I watched them for a few minutes, because they seemed to be forming up in long north-south ranks. I wondered if it was a trick of perspective or of perhaps there was some gigantically long-wavelength resonance in the atmosphere that was pushing the clouds into their slots. That’s the way I was thinking that day, in my interlude between fixing software bugs.

It’s always windy in a convertible, so the top went down and off I went, north. I’m not sure why I chose Edmonton except that I knew I could get the Internet, it was reasonably close, and it was a hockey town. OK, when I put it that way, it’s pretty compelling, but still it would have been wiser to head south, more in the direction of my next destination. Toward where I won’t be racking up hefty roaming charges when the client calls. Wiser, schmiser. I went north.

The highway between Calgary and Edmonton is what you would expect between two large cities, wide, easy, and under construction. When I turned north into the wind I turned off the tunes. The roar of the wind was so fierce that even with the stereo up pretty high I couldn’t tell it was on at all. I wondered what the roar was doing to my ears. Many of my peers have rock ‘n’ roll deafness, I think twenty years of convertibles may have had a similar effect on me (along with the rock ‘n’ roll, of course).

That’s what I did on that drive. I wondered things. On a small highway I’ll turn my headlights on, but on a road like that in the bright sun I won’t. Why? To save electricity. The logic goes like this: You turn off your lights at home to save energy, and your headlights take just as much energy as the lights in your house. That energy has to come from somewhere. Turning off headlights should improve your mileage. And I’m sure it does. Just not measurably. That got me to thinking about how people, when energy is very dear, will diligently turn off lights before driving half a mile to the convenience store for milk. So I’m thinking about the amount of energy a car cruising along the highway consumes relative to a lightbulb. If our engines were rated in watts instead of horsepower, the relationship would be easier to see. But then I thought some more. You can’t compare them outright because the efficiency of producing the energy and transporting it are different. then I thought some more. And some more.

I passed a gas station sitting right next to a refinery with the same brand name. I thought they should put out a sign bragging about how fresh their gas was. “Straight from the refinery to you!”

I thought about thinking about stuff. I thought about thinking about the American Road Myth. I shouted my thoughts into my dictation thingie. “The farther north I go,” I hollered, “The easier it is for me to imagine that I am on a ball, scrambling up the curve of it’s surface.”

“It’s all in my head,” I added.

Thanks!

Calgary

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The morning broke bright and clear in Canmore. I spent the morning doing a little work and writing about the Hockey game the night before. You might have heard about it. Finally I checked out and loaded up the car. It was chilly, but not top-up chilly. I tied everything down and as I was getting ready to leave when a motorcyclist who was parked next to me noticed the license plate.

“Californ-eye-eh” he said. “You’ve come a long way.”

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere, but he didn’t want to know about that. He and some friends had ridden in from Edmonton for the weekend. “It rained on us the whole way,” he said. “We got soaked.”

“I must have been lucky,” I said.

“Top down the whole way, eh?”

“Pretty much.” I had the top up the first day, from San Diego to Grover Beach. That was more than two months ago. There were other times the top was up, but not when I was traveling.

We chatted a little more. I asked if Edmonton was rooting for the Flames now, or if even the idea of Lord Stanley’s Cup coming to Canada was not enough to overcome the rivalry between the cities. “Oh, during the season, ya kno, no way. But when things get this advanced, we’re all Canadians. Although,” he added, “Half the team is Americans and the other half is Europeans. But you know how it is.” He laughed, I laughed. He recommended I take the old highway 1A down into Calgary, rather than the new highway 1. “More relaxed, ya kno?” I wished him a safe and dry ride home, and pulled out.

I filled up the tank and pointed the car east and down, through foothills covered with lush grass, following a shimmering river. Overhead the sun was becoming more the exception than the rule, and ahead was a solid wall of black. The end of the world. I was heading right toward it. The air abruptly became decidedly colder and somehow fresher. Livelier. I started looking for a place to pull over to put the top up. I was driving along a stretch of road with ditches immediately on either side. In my head I was tallying the value of the electronics lying exposed to the weather when I finally found a spot. I pulled off the long straight road as far as I could, unloaded, put the top up, and reloaded. I had gone less than a mile when it started to rain hard.

This will sound strange to anyone not from Southern California, but I had no idea how my tires were going to handle the rain. They have a lot of miles on them and will need replacing soon. It had been many months and thousands of miles since they – or I – had driven in significant rain. People joke about how many accidents there are when there is the slightest sprinkle in San Diego. I expect part of it is that after all those months, people have no idea their tires are bald and their wiper blades are shot. But I digress.

I got to Calgary and found a hotel for the night. I figured this would be a good place to see my work to completion, but there were simply no rooms at all in the city for the following days. None. There is a big petroleum conference in town this week. One hotel guy suggested I try Canmore.

No matter. I had a place for sunday night and an excellent Internet connection. I got a lot of work done. I had been invited to a chinese restaurant/lounge in Calgary by the woman next to me while I watched the hockey game, but I didn’t make it down to that part of town. This is what has become of me. I passed up a chance at a free beer. She had been pretty enthusiastic about my road trip as well, asking questions that in other circumstances I might have found leading, but she was just friendly. Her husband was friendly too.

In Calgary, then, ensconced in a nice but pricey room, I had a little time on my hands, so I went to find a bar nearby. I landed a block away at a place called earl’s. earl’s could have the slogan, “We’re pricey, but we’re trendy.” I nearly turned around and left when I saw the fancy decor, but the hostess caught me while I was trapped in indecision and therefore easily led. The hostess was also very attractive.

The entire staff was clearly chosen for their looks as well as their outgoing personalities. earl’s report card – price: D; ambience: D (unless you like that sort of thing); service: A. I had no urge whatsoever to become a regular there, nor I suspect, would the management be that excited about having me as a regular. I had some good food and pounded my head against The Monster Within for a while.

After that it was work and figuring out where I would sleep the following night. I knew it had to be a Hockey town.

Thanks!