The other day. Drove to Detour, had coffee with my parents. Went to the gym with my mother, taught her how to do dumbbell RDLs. Suffered through pause squats, narrow-grip bench, developed thin scratchy red marks on my shoulders. Fossilized remnants of my arch, my leg drive, how furiously I press the triangular wings of my shoulders into the vinyl black bench. All to bench less than a 15-year-old boy. I switched the gym I go to in Hamilton since it turns out the old one housed a white supremacist fight club. In the CBC article the gym owner claimed he didn’t know, but later my friend messaged me and told me he had known, in fact her friend had threatened to cancel her membership 2 years ago if he didn’t eject the neo-nazis. I guess I can’t name the gym without alleging something. This is why I had to leave Hamilton, the sheer Hamiltonness of it all.
Dropped by my friend G’s house. Picked up him and his partner J. We drove to the Printed Word. I bought Break it Down by Lydia Davis. I bought The Years by Annie Ernaux. I bought this weird book called Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev by Maxim Gorky. Always wanted to get into socialist realism, but it’s non-fiction. Translated by S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (!). Hogarth Press printed it in 1920 but the copy I bought is a reprint by Viking Press. A physically beautiful book, copper orange paper, calligraphic white and black type, in the corner $1.25, $1.45 in Canada. No thin polyvinyl layer as far as I can tell. Every time I go here I’m mildly convinced the curly-haired guy behind the counter is a genius. The best English-language secondhand bookstore I’ve been to in Canada, better than the Word (sorry), better than the ones I’ve wandered through in Vancouver, Toronto, generally cheaper. And I’m always looking for The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck, but I never find it. I guess I could order it online, look on Ebay, but I’m waiting for the perfect moment in which it comes into my life.
Waiting for the perfect moment in which something comes into my life. G is reading Robinson Crusoe, some novel by Don DeLillo. We are actually the same person. I told him how I bought Moll Flanders by accident a few weeks ago, wanting to buy something by Don DeLillo, but then I saw Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. This erased my entire memory of Don DeLillo as a physical entity, overwrote it, and I was like wow, what’s wrong with me, why did I think Daniel Defoe was a contemporary author? After all he was mentioned in Orlando. The fallibility of memory. G said, “We’re on the same journey, you and I.” The drive from Dundas, along the road in which you can go 80 km/h even though it’s not a highway. Turtle crossing signs everywhere. It’s called Cootes Drive, I Google and learn, but I don’t know that here, I don’t even understand maps of Hamilton from above, because I just always know where to go. Driving by feel. It seems absurd, birds’-eye cartography, like these roads are actually supposed to fit together, cohere, when it doesn’t matter at all. I am an ant in a car. I am driving along King, Queen, Dundurn, Aberdeen. So very colonial, royalist, English Canada. Still remember a friend’s mom speaking disparagingly of Meghan Markle, totally unironically. Like, what. Like the UK is a real place. Sure, our coins have a young woman’s face on them, now a man’s, regal, crowned. But no one carries cash now anyways.
Drove to Mulberry Café, parked, G paid. In the café the three of us talking about films, actually mostly J and G, I’m ignorant. Discussing Lawrence of Arabia, the 1965 Othello with Laurence Olivier in blackface. G and J explained the Jakarta method after I randomly brought up how everyone’s sleeping on Indonesia: the fourth-largest country in the world, the most biodiversity, over 700 languages. Not them, apparently. Sometimes I remember I could live in Hamilton, sometimes I remember G and I have been in each other’s lives for at least 10 years now. Back and forth VIA rail, always texting every couple months, always returning. Always meeting in the same park, by the same tree, on the same bench. And the way life here is marked by repetition, memory, the way everyone knows everyone. I told G one of our school’s math teachers died and he told me about this girl’s evangelical conversion. The one who was drunk at some school dance. And so on, and so on. People talk, J said.
Watched so many films since I got here. Eddington. The new Wes Anderson film, the Phoenician Scheme, my eyelashes fluttering closed in that dark movie theatre. My dad and I lulled to sleep by that beautiful symmetrical framing, the toylike plot. I blinked awake to the shocking whiteness of the daughter’s white habit. Michael Cera is actually kind of good in this film.
Yesterday night in G’s house. Cued up some CDs on the player, listened to Playtime by Jacques Tati. J said, that film made me feel so understood, like someone really knew me. Talked about Broken Social Scene, how I can’t stop listening to “Lover’s Spit”, indie dad rock. And they’re from Toronto! G cooked pasta with cilantro pesto, one of those no-protein meals that is unfathomably good, did the dishes. I watched Twilight with my head in J’s lap as they solved a Rubik’s cube over and over. I remembered I miss it here.