An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 36. Dark Matter.
Three domestic opportunities for minimalism arise. Oh baby. It’s rare for even one to come up these days since I’m already down to brass tacks (Tacks? Excessive!).
1. Life without microwaves
A microwave oven is something most devout minimalists are proud to be free of, but since I tend to rent furnished apartments there’s usually one around.
When our microwave exploded last weekend, my girlfriend suggested we try to live without it rather than replace it. Music to my ears!
Since I do most of our cooking the old-fashioned way, the only thing we ever used the microwave for was to reheat leftover coffee (a dirty habit anyway). I suspect we will not replace it. Already the microwave-shaped empty space in our tiny kitchen is nourishing my minimalist soul.
2. Eradication of DVD
Years ago, I minimised my DVD collection by jettisoning the cases and filing the discs into a handy DJ case. I now have an alphabetised DVD collection the size of a shoe box. It’s a work of art.
But! I want rid of it. Watching DVDs has become a bore. I prefer to read books for home entertainment these days; but even if you’re happy to watch videos, DVDs are a lousy experience compared to Internet downloads. They jump, they’re often incompatible with newer media software, and you have to humour the obstacle courses of animated menus and the offensive anti-piracy warnings. So I’m giving away my beloved collection of classic British sitcoms to my friend Phil, a Canadian, who likes British comedy and will be new to much of my curated treasure.
3. A blitz on Dark Matter
I’ve wanted to mention ‘Dark Matter’ for ages. Dark Matter is the mysterious, barely-detectable matter that physicists believe accounts for much of the universe’s mass. It’s also the metaphor I use for the unseen stuff shoved into the backs of cupboards. It’s the shameful plaque-like accumulations that minimalists don’t count on their inventories, preferring instead to pretend it doesn’t exist. But there can be loads of it! (By loads, in our case, I mean there was a desk lamp, some empty boxes, and a beach towel — like I say, brass tacks). It’s now no longer with us.
Why the sudden attack on our Dark Matter? We used to keep suitcases under our bed, something which has always bothered me. They would accumulate dust bunnies and the symbolism alone was a headache, so I wanted to relocate them to our closet, hence the need to clear it out.
Now that we’ve courageously tackled Dark Matter, the breath of chi dragons can swirl around us unencumbered as we sleep.
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An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 35: Sherlock Holmes
My partner and I like to read to each other. She reads when her North American accent lends itself well to a story, and I read the silly English stuff.
Lately, I’ve handled the majority of the reading because we’ve been munching our way through the canon of Sherlock Holmes.
We recently passed the halfway point, a fact that leaves me slightly melancholy: what to do when it’s all over? Should we cut the remainder with Solar Pons to make it last longer?
Reading Holmes together is extremely entertaining and I can’t recommend it enough. If nothing else, you can have fun with your range of character voices. I challenge any man not to be seduced by my staccato ‘lady’ voice, and not to shrink into submission upon hearing my Terry Jones-style ‘harridan’ voice, used exclusively for elder housekeepers and Mrs Hudson.
My vocal showboating is sometimes punished: I’ll invest a character with an impressive but difficult-to-maintain accent only discover he has five pages of solid dialogue.
There are times when a reading becomes positively theatrical, such as when one Mr Cyril Overton punctuates his telling of The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter by repeatedly slapping his knee. I’ve also experimented with adding soundtracks in the form of ‘Victorian street noise’ and ‘crackling fireplace’ tracks from YouTube, though it tends to distract.
I’m the proud owner of the best Sherlock Holmes edition ever published, but it’s rather too bulky for cozy reading and the intriguing marginal notes compete with the story, so we’ve been using the lighter-weight versions for free from the library. Trips to the library to choose the next volume is part of the fun (only a fool would read them in order – start with Adventures and then Hound).
Holmes is riddled with jokes and uproarious humour. There are tropes that make us laugh because we’ve learned to recognize them as portentous. Our favourite is the hubris displayed by police officers, immediately plowed down by Holmes and followed by a sartorial insult from bitchy Watson. For example, this description of Lestrade:
The official detective was attired in a pea-jacket and cravat, which gave him a decidedly nautical appearance.
Out of context, this doesn’t sound like much but take it from me that it’s a bloody brilliant joke.
The stories are also told with howlingly wonderful innuendo, verging on a kind of polari. Holmes and Watson are clearly a couple: another good reason for reading this as a couple.
Why you might also like to take up reading the Sherlock Holmes books aloud:
– It’s free (and one should always be on the lookout for free hobbies);
– A completely ‘unplugged’ activity, it takes you away from the TV and computer screens (unless you choose to use an e-reader, in which case you lose again);
– A Holmes short story or a chapter from one of the novels fits neatly into an hour;
– It’s a communal event, prompting you to savour something together instead of in isolation;
– By the time you’re finished, you’ll be an expert on Sherlock Holmes and can kick arse in the quiz at your local Sherlock Holmes society;
– As an Escapologist, Holmes’ lifestyle can inspire you to live by your wits as he does.
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An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 34.
I’m about to break my own first rule of blogging and apologise for the hiatus in my posting for a while.
(Why apologise? You owe nothing. No vows of regularity were promised. Nobody loses money. Maybe the world is even better off without your usual twopence worth!)
But it’s been two weeks: it’s all I can do not to fall to the floor and initiate a full-blown grovel-a-thon.
I feel guilty. Especially as there are so many new readers since my recent blossover with the prolific Mr Money Mustache. Why, they must be baffled, kicking at the dust in this blogless void, shrugging at each other and saying, “The mustachioed one is usually right about these things! We’ll wait a while longer.”
Do not worry. Godot arrives after all and the hiatus can be explained with ease. My companion and I have been travelling. Specifically, we made a two-week journey across Canada by train.
It was beautiful! We saw the Rocky Mountains; paddled in the Athabaska River; photographed an elk and a grizzly bear; went for a ride in a cable car; visited some old X-Files shooting locations; met the thoughtful David Caine of Raptitude; went hiking and generally saw sights. More than anything, we were humbled by the stupendous scale of this humongous country.
But this isn’t a travel blog, my good friends. I won’t bore you with the slideshow. (Though if you’re into that, please go ahead and enjoy the slideshow).
Travel by train is a most Escapological way to go. The journey is more leisurely, more fun, more scenic, more communal, more impressively gentle than air flight. You’re more likely to clap your eyes on a grazing moose and less likely to end up with chapped lips and a migraine. Want to escape the strong force? Try the train.
Some of you are likely wondering where the upcoming Issue Nine of New Escapologist has got to. We’re still working on it! Despite travel, we have not taken our eyes off it for a moment. We’re trying to fulfill our promise of an August release, but we may run a week or so late. Time to close this diary entry in precisely the same way it opened: “Sorry”.
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An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 33.
Time for a belated End of Year Review and Report to My Imaginary Shareholders.
The purpose of these Diary columns is to help answer the question of “what would I do if I didn’t go to work?”. So bear with me, while I rabble on about my year. I’ll keep it brief.
2012 was a pretty mellow year, very idler-friendly and without as many landmark events as 2011. The main thing has been adjusting to my somewhat isolated but luxuriously lazy life in Montreal: a city of extreme climates, both political and actual. This year, if I’ve been not navigating a tricky conversation in French or marching alongside protesting students with their proud red squares and V masks, I’ve been trudging through record-levels of snow and wondering why Pussy Riot-style balaclavas aren’t more popular here. Still, it all helps to keep the rent down.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 32.
Another Expozine. I’m genuinely alarmed by how quickly it rolled around. I thought time would slow down in the post-escape world, but (to me at least) it seems to fly by just as fast as when I was a clock-watcher.
It was a fun Expozine. Fairly disastrous in terms of sales (we only sold nineteen copies, which isn’t really enough) but a good time was had all the same.
Our neighbour was Rebecca Heartz who apropos of nothing asked me if I like Stewart Lee and The Chap: two of my favourite things in the world. What a hero. She makes and sells prints and postcards of cute/grotesque, often post-apocalyptic scenarios. Lots of bunnies with tentacles. Brilliant.
We were visited by V, who originally discovered us by googling “how to escape” or something. She moved to Montreal recently, quite possibly on the advice of New Escapologist Issue Three. “Are you Robert Wringham?” she said upon coming to the table, which always makes my ego inflate to bursting point and sends it whizzing off around the room.
Later, there was a chap, N, who said he’d been in hospital with a mushroom-induced psychosis when someone brought him his first copy of New Escapologist. To pay for his second, he popped outside and busked for twenty minutes: something that filled me with unpredictable glee.
Since he busks near to a farmer’s market and is friends with some of the traders, N also gave us a bag of fresh kale.
I was happy to meet Roxanne and her famous ballz. She recently moved from Montreal to Glasgow. When she emailed a few months ago, I’d assumed she knew I was a Glaswegian in Montreal and that she wanted to talk about that. But she had no idea and just wanted to talk about New Escapologist. We were in each other’s social orbits on both sides of the Atlantic and didn’t know it. She works in The Thirteenth Note, Glasgow friends, so be sure to go and annoy her, preferably by asking lots of questions about her massive, foreign ballz.
We were also visited by many local friends who we don’t see enough of. That’s the thing about Expozine: it’s a beacon to hipster layabouts. Watching so many familiar faces come bright-eyed through the doors is like something from The Tommyknockers.
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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 32. Unquiet Revolution.
Every evening this week at 8pm, we’ve taken saucepans and kitchen utensils onto the balcony and made a racket. Odd behaviour, I know, but we’re not alone. For twenty minutes each night, residents of Montreal make as much noise as possible. Those at home rattle their pans, motorists sound their horns, pedestrians cheer and shout and whistle. The symphony is heard across the city and everyone knows what it means.
Things are getting exciting here. As I type this, the apartment is filled with the sound of revolution: joyous pan-rattling from rooftops and balconies, shouting in the streets; urgent sirens and helicopters. Thousands take to the streets each night, waving red flags and chanting en Français.
It all started with campus-based student demonstrations opposing a $1,625 increase in tuition fees. But when the Quebec National Assembly attempted to quash the protests by initiating an emergency law called Bill 78 on May 18th, it somewhat fanned the flames.
It’s not just students anymore. The protest crowds and the saucepan-bangers are from all walks of life. People won’t tolerate such brutal top-down interference in what we’re allowed to do. Whether or not you disapprove of the fee increase, you probably feel that citizens have the right to peaceful protest.
On the street, people register their approval of the protests by wearing red squares of cloth pinned to their clothes. As the protests continue and the issues mature, more and more of these red patches appear. What was originally a student meme is now a mainstream gesture of mass objection. Statistics suggest that the majority of the public are not yet behind the protest (irritated as they are by the resulting traffic jams and metro closures) but the racket of the pans each night suggests that a large number of people support it.
A single street protest last weekend was apparently largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.
Tuition fees were the initial thrust of the protests, and residential disapproval of Bill 78 is a catalyst, but banners carried by the crowds suggest a wider dissatisfaction with the current government and capitalism at large. Many see the hiked tuition fees as symptomatic of the political corruption and gross financial mismanagement of the last few years. Since the 1960s, people have worked hard to guarantee a certain standard of public service and accessible education to help ensure a decent quality of life for all. It is a shame to let all of that disappear now.
Hundreds of thousands of street protesters marched past our Park Avenue apartment building last night, proudly flouting the demands of the emergency law. Hundreds will have been arrested.
Montreal’s mayor, says “we need to reclaim our streets” as if the protesters were a pesky minority and that he somehow stands with “us” against “them”. But the divide is not between miscreant protesters and right-thinking citizens. The divide is between residents and government.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 31.
Each installment of this diary is an addition to the ball of data serving as an answer to the pesky question, “What would I do all day if I didn’t go to work?”
I have chosen not to go to work anymore. That is, I no longer consent to being an employee. Instead, I fill my days with projects, capers, and a deep commitment to idling.
Here’s a quick review of my 2011: another full year of such indulgent ducking and diving.
The juiciest fruits of the year were the completion of my first book (due for publication this March); my finally emigrating to Montreal from Glasgow (the fruit of almost three years dicking about with the most amazing Brazil-like bureaucratic system); the launch of New Escapologist Issues 5 and 6 (our best issues to date in my opinion); and a thrilling stint at the Edinburgh Festival.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 30.
Blimey. It has been a very busy few weeks. I’d have had a far more relaxing life if I’d only kept my office job. Just kidding. I’d be doing less, but I’d also be having a horrible time. I hate computer solitaire.
After a successful meeting in Cardiff about my writing a [non-escapological] book, I went travelling in Eastern Europe. A friend and I explored Zagreb, Ljubljana, Budapest, and Bratislava. We visited a Turkish bath house, went to the ballet, spotted a voodoo chicken claw, ate too much pickled cheese, and enjoyed a demonstration of a Tesla cage.
I was perhaps inordinately excited to see Budapest because of its inclusion in the Ray Bradbury quote in the first ever New Escapologist:
See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan Midnight. Love a beautiful woman.
Working on the rest of that one now. Not sure I fancy falling off a cliff though, if I’m honest.
(By the way, that quote has shown up in a LOT of self-helpy contexts since we put it in New Escapologist! I know for a fact New Escapologist is the source of its proliferation because it almost always includes my very own typo!)
After the Eastern European leg of my recent journey, I stopped briefly in Scotland to say goodbye to Glasgow for a while and to perform at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre before flying out to Montreal, where I am today.
I started this diary as a way of qualitatively answering the frequently-asked question “what do you do if you don’t have a job?” and I think my activities of the past few weeks demonstrate some of the best things about the post-escape life. In short, you probably do what you like.
Of course, what daring escape stories often fail to mention is the maddening paperwork that comes with super-mobility. I spent many hours this week trying to get the Internet working at our new Montreal apartment; recovering from jet-lag, and applying for local services like Social Insurance, Medicare, Tax Credit, mandatory French classes and so on. All I really want to do at this point is sit down and write my book, but these annoying things have to be fixed first. It must be possible to escape admin completely, but I’ve not found a comfortable way yet. Such an escape would almost certainly involve some kind of shack and a woodland grove. Not completely unthinkable, of course.
Tired of the everyday grind? Buy the latest New Escapologist at the shop.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 29.
Every weekday morning, at about 10:15, the postman buzzes the ground floor intercom.
As the only unused person in the building, I have become responsible for letting him in. Sometimes I’m preparing the breakfast when he buzzes, but sometimes his buzzing wakes me up and I have to get out of bed.
This morning, I decided to ignore his buzzing. I’d been up late attending to the pressing business of watching Jeeves & Wooster videos, and was far too sleepsome to worry about activating leg muscles and so on. Someone else would have to deal with it.
But they didn’t. Nobody let the postman in. So there was no post today.
I’ve only been living here for six months. How did the postman ever deliver his load to these flats before I was here to let him in? Did they only start receiving post six months ago? What did they think was happening? “Something’s just come through the door, Jeff. It’s all wrapped up in brown paper. And what’s LoveFilm? I’m scared.”
This reminded me of something I observed years ago but never reported here: the fact half of the planet expects you to work 9-5 while the other half expects you to be continually available.
If you need to meet with a bank manager or even do something as perfunctory as deposit a cheque, you have to be available at some point between 9 and 5 (or 10 and 4, if you need my local HSBC). If you’re expecting the delivery of a new washing machine or a fruit juicer or whatever, you have to be at home between 9 and 5 to receive it. If you need to visit the post office, a government office or a public library, you’d better be available during the conventional working hours. You often can’t even do it on the weekend.
How does anyone achieve even the smallest personal maintenance task while also juggling a job? When I had a job, I would use the office mail room, telephones and computers to conduct personal business. But this is against the rules. I only got things done by being a renegade. If I’d been caught using the mail room to send my own stuff around, I’d almost certainly have received a disciplinary.
Today I discover that even the postman needs someone to be at home. And yet! The other half of the world – the education system, the job centre, even your own family – seems hellbent on getting you out of your pajamas and into the blasted workforce.
To be a functioning member of society, you have to sell your hours of 9-5. But in doing so, you essentially remove yourself from society by being perpetually unavailable for anything. Is that how society works? The employed serve only the unemployed? If so, the jobbies should be thanking the skivers for keeping them in a job.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 28.
The Sulking Ape and Other Stories (last week’s launch event for Issue Six) was a smash. I’d go as far to say it was the best launch event we’ve ever done. Live performance definitely trumps DJs and wine receptions.
The Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms saw Escapological readings from Neil, Aislínn, Reggie and myself; live music from Reggie, Nick and Scotch Todd; Laura took the photographs; and Samara did the promotional artwork.
The event was organised, quite excitingly, almost at the last possible minute. We knew in advance which readings we’d do and approximately how the event would fit together; but thanks to our jam-packed August schedules, the venue and promotion were always going to be last-second affairs.
We managed to find a cancelled show at the Voodoo Rooms, which put us in the position of being stand-ins for an entirely separate show (an ‘alternative cabaret’ show) so most of the audience had actually arrived in anticipation of something else entirely. I think they’d been expecting a burlesque dancer to do something inventive with ping-pong balls, so it was a relief to see that they didn’t expect the same from us.
This may seem like something from a nightmare: you and your five pals have to entertain a discerning audience who have come to see alternative cabaret. The crowd took a sporting chance and I think we were able to sufficiently intrigue.
Each reader was a contributor to Issue Six, and so we read from our own pieces. Neil read from his evolutionary cautionary tale, ‘The Sulking Ape’, the title of which we took for the event itself. I read a whimsical piece imparting the virtues of sitting to pee. Aislínn read from her astonishing directory of unorthodox funereal practices, and Reggie from his biographical article about the naturalist Leonard Dubkin. Reggie’s piece, accompanied by music from the Wireless Mystery Theatre was simply beautiful.
Still buzzing from my own Fringe show at another venue, I was full of beans as the MC. I felt obliged to point out that Reggie’s beautiful reading “contained no urine, testicles or dead bodies” as the previous readings had done, but that “it did include a reference to spider silk, which I think we can all agree is fucking filthy. Thanks for that Reggie”.
Reggie and the Wireless Mystery Boys then played the audience softly out of the venue.
I must extend big thanks to all of the performers and to everyone who came along. Thanks also to Peter Buckley Hill for allowing this last-second addition to his Free Fringe lineup.
MEMO: There may be a slight delay with sending all of the subscriber copies out. We printed a very small number for the event, in case of printer errors. We’re going to do one last proof-read before we print the second batch. Shouldn’t be much longer than a week though. Thanks for your patience!
