will he, in fact, get to tell us about his awesome october?
it turns out, not until December. Of course, if you were in Portland for Columbus Day, you don't need me to tell you how great it was, and if you weren't, you don't need my rubbing it in your face. And maybe you were never curious about the fate of the McBarge. All the same, we had adventures, and what are adventures for if not sharing?

For sitting on and waiting to share, it seems. Instead I spend my last few hours in town this two-day stint preparing for still further adventure; the Outlaw Band's final grand circuit tour before Joey Only moves out of town for the winter. A little sick now, the next two weeks will see if my health improves any by throwing myself on the mercy of a genuine Canadian winter and providing ill backup squeezebox in Smithers on Friday, Dunster on Saturday, Edmonton on Sunday, Saskatoon Tuesday through Wednesday, Canmore the 22nd, the Palomino in Calgary the 23rd (catch you there, mrputter?), and Fernie the 25th and 27th. (Then we scrape together whatever frostbitten fragments remain of me to front the surging Planks at the Cirque de Sag on the 30th... following which we mount our month-long celebrations of the first year of broadcast for Accordion Noir!

With such a bombastic blowout there is necessarily some collateral damage: 57 Varieties at Spartacus Nov 20th is necessarily off, as I'll be in Saskatoon and was unable to line up a replacement host. (What is momentum for, after all, if not being rudely disrupted?) Instead, I direct its verbally curious contingent to its permanent schedule conflict, the Twisted Poets literary salon at the renowned (I'm nowning it right now!) Nebur-King Coffee at 3646 West Broadway... this month featuring spillious! (Closer to now, another eminently worthwhile event I'm necessarily missing to have a sane chance of taking on the frosty north is Rick Keating's open mic to(thursday)night, 7pm at that Little Mountain Neighbourhood House (at 3981 Main Street... given its host surely worthwhile even were it lacking its feature tonight the wonderful + splendid Joanna Chapman-Smith! I'll be busy heading directly into the hoary fist of Old Man Winter without so much as a post-nasal drip remedy but for those less foolish you have no such excuse; check it out, it should be a delight.)

Life on the road (read: in the back seat of the van), while depriving me of the opportunity for focus needed to gather my thoughts and write (was I ever foolish enough to set down my intentions here of that being my chief priority for this year?), is at least granting me ample time to pursue my cross-country hobby of reading long books I might never otherwise take on, as with Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow in my 2002 trip. (If only we had sunlight past 4 pm! I will be buying many batteries for someone's headlamp.) Brautigan's Willard and his Bowling Trophies whetted the appetite (I could peel and swallow those sad fruits whole for easily ten times its length, if not indefinitely -- unfortunately the jarring, arbitrarily bizarre titular subplot and its stilted and repetitive experimental minimalist (come on, throw out a few more adjectives!) diction left me Third Policeman cold), but despite the current Demons deathmatch underway, Notes from Underground shut me down completely. (These aren't huge tomes, but they were just baby steps on weekend excursions. Now I've got two weeks ahead of me!) I am getting a real kick out of my volume of Rabelais -- perhaps the perfect ratio of references to Roman orators vs. fart jokes, scientifically balanced to cater to my particular tastes -- and have also stowed Don Quixote along for the ride. This would be a perfect occasion to try out the Manuscript found in Saragossa the busker-sister-in-Poland was just grilling me about, but since it hasn't yet found itself relegated to $2 bargain bin toilet paper canon status it ain't among my choices. This question really warrants further thought, since, like fresh vegetables and rechargeable batteries, good used books are tricky to encounter among the regular paces of life on the road (perhaps as true in the Canadian prairies as in Australia.) All the same I have a lot of packing yet to do before the morning and most of it is even more mission-critical than literature. (What? Something more important than literature? I was skeptical also... then I got an agonizing hangnail. Try sawing that one off with a deft paper cut!)

Sorry for the shopping list. When I get back I may be able to expand my genre command to that of the expired shopping list -- with pictures!