I SLOWED DOWN A LITTLE TOO MUCH (AND GOD IT WAS GOOD)
So, if it’s not immediately obvious, I only really talk shit about stuff I love, and I love the SHIT out of Canada. Well, the western bit- haven’t seen all that eastern stuff in a while. For all I know, those french-speakin’, poutine-eatin’ bastards up in Montreal are just as big of jerks as we all suspect. But these west-coast Canadians?
Yum. Double yum! And not just because they’re all hot- they absolutely are- but because they’re so dang cool and nice, too. I was only able to get into Vancouver on a Temporary Hotness Passport, and while everybody was nice about it… They knew. Us uggos are only allowed to stay for a week, which is pretty fair. Can you honestly say the photo above wouldn’t be improved by cropping the left side a bit?
What were we talking about? Oh, right, NOTHING. Get your chamomile tea and comfy slippers, kids, because you’re about to be bored to death. Why? Because there ain’t nothing more boring than health and happiness, and I was a long pour of both this week.
It wasn’t much in the way of hyberbole, my signoff from last post- this was genuinely one of the best weeks of my whole life. And just like it was hard to adequately explain why the Worldcon week was so bad, it’s also difficult to explain why this one was so good.
Is that going to stop me from trying? Hell no. My pops didn’t raise no quitter. Or… someone with any ability to edit himself. He did teach me how to hammer stuff, tho.
SO WHAT DID YOU ACTUALLY DO, MR. HAPPY PANTS?
Well, some stuff I guess! I found a beach on the southern edge of BC and spent two days there, writing and walking up and down the beach and getting sympathetic smiles from all the hot Canadians, as if being ugly and American were congenital problems and I shouldn’t feel bad about them… That was nice. Then I found the world’s second best Walmart parking lot to crash in, found a bevvie store and had a few Van Beers(tm). Then I drove through Vancouver without stopping, despite the fact that I’ve been talking about how much I loved Vancouver for THIRTY STRAIGHT YEARS (no exaggeration) since I was there last.
Hm, what else.
Oh! They have this whole enormous goddamn island right north of the city called Stanley Park that looked like the most awesome thing that you could ever imagine, and I sort of drove quickly through it and didn’t stop or take any pictures…
I did drive up Highway 99 to a place very improbably called ‘Squamish’, and stayed at the VERY BEST Walmart parking lot of all time. I’m so mad I didn’t get a picture- this parking lot was 85% vans and RV’s. There was this one that was literally a semi truck with a camper on the back that I would completely believe was Batman’s vacation home. It was awesome. All of the 300k van people with their ‘look we go everywhere’ stickers gave me sympathetic looks, like having a beat-up construction van and being American were congenital problems, ect. But I did meet a wild shirtless Irishman in a 1972 conversion van who looked inside my van and gave me a cool ‘nice rig’, so now I can die happy. A real fuckin’ Nomadlander, that gent. Said he’d been living on a variety of vehicles (vans, cars, boats) for twenty years. I’ve never wanted to be somebody so bad in my life.
What else… what else. Oh! Highway 99 is called the Sea-to-Sky highway, because it starts at water-level in Vancouver and climbs up the side of mountains and is just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And despite its name, Squamish is as cool a little mountain town as you can imagine; I found a coffeeshop there called ‘Wonderlands’, and you know I was going to go there.
North of Squamish is another stretch of hideously beautiful road that leads up to Whistler, a ski-resort town that is like if you took the coolest ski lodge you’ve ever been to and then made it like, the size of Cleveland. And nestled it into some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous mountains you’ve ever seen. They held the Winter Olympics there… Man, I don’t know when. I don’t watch the Olympics. I’d ask Google but the stupid AI will probably tell me that the Winter Olympics got banned in 1983 by President Kermit-The-Frog and is now owned by Red Bull, taking place on the deci-centennial in Tampa. Which is an event I would watch.
Anyways… Whistler? I guess I walked around it. I have a picture! I must have been there, right?
What else, what else… I headed back south, down the insanely beautiful road (I mean I genuinely would go around a bend and see something and be like, angry at it. Like, fuck off. Nothing gets to be that gorgeous! And that was just the barista dude at the coffeeshop HEYO!) and had a couple great nights just sleeping by the side of the road. I tried to find my book in some bookstores in Vancouver, but I must the Google AI must have given me a list of ‘best bookstores in Vancouver’ that was a little too ‘cool’, because all of them were these really neat little old used bookstores that didn’t have any new books and definitely didn’t have mine. So I spent a whole… afternoon… in one corner of a city that I would have said was my favorite in the world… and then left.
Hm. Anything else? Oh! I went looking for more bookstores and found a little fishing town called Stevenson, and tried some fresh-caught wild salmon sushi, and hung out in a cool coffeeshop for an afternoon, wishing my Hotness Passport wasn’t running out, and I could stay in the Great North forever.
That’s it! Had a tense time waiting in line to get back into the States, which turned out to be nothing once the border guard made sure I wasn’t smuggling any Hot Canadians into our proud, uggo-filled country.
And that was all she wrote. Spent Sunday night in the same cute little rest-stop north of Seattle I’d stayed in when I was headed north.
Good times. Good week. Saw some stuff. Did some stuff. Ate some stuff.
SO WHY WAS IT THE BEST WEEK OF YOUR LIFE AGAIN?
Well… I mean, let’s acknowledge the existence of hyperbole, and acknowledge how often I use it. I tend to exaggerate, is what I’m saying. I mean, best week of my life? I’ve had some good weeks in the 50 years I’m lugging around. It’s hard to compete with some of those teenage weeks, right? A few vacations are up there; the week after I found my agent and the week after I got my big book advance (so many shots, so much drugs, almost no book advance left after it, zero regrets). The week I wrote, recorded, mixed, and handed out an entire album. Some good weeks!
Was this week better than those? Man, I don’t know. It was pretty fuckin’ good.
You see, one of the things I didn’t know about Dear Canada is that my cell-phone carrier, T-Mobile, apparently doesn’t like the place. Or, to be more accurate, doesn’t like me visiting the place. So while my phone was registering a solid, meaty five bars even up in the mountains, I couldn’t get nothin’. I could send a few texts, even managed a very choppy video call, but using social media was annoying as hell, doing my estimating work from the road was impossible, and forget about watching YouTube or movies.
So I parked my little van at the beach, feeling oddly uncomfortable at being cut off from the world; what would I do if I wanted to find out what dumb thing Katy Perry did this week? What if somebody just found that hilarious post I made last week and left a comment? What if one of my friends sent me a meme? How would I survive without a steady diet of YouTube skits and reviews of video games I’ll never play? What if my beloved Wintergatan drops a new video about the Marble Machine?
What if I… What if I get bored?
THE SIREN CALL (OF YOUTUBE)
Like a lot of people nowadays, I think, I have this unreasoning, abject fear of being bored for even one second, ever. I won’t litigate the causes just now and I don’t think it’s anywhere near as simple as some Boomer ‘just put the dang phone down’ thing, because I see a lot of folks out here in the world and I think some of our elders are even more addicted to their phones than the youngs. I don’t quite know when I got like this; I don’t think I used to be.
I mean, I couldn’t have been, right? I clearly remember a time when phones had cords, and computers were something they used to launch rocket ships.
But I do have a kind of deep terror about being bored, about not having something that will stimulate me at all hours. And it’s gotten much worse over the years; I’m to the point now where doing any kind of work on the computer without something playing on a second screen- YouTube, watching It’s Always Sunny for the billionth time- is almost intolerable for me. I’d even gotten to the point where I would have entertainment on while I was playing video games.
Now, to be clear- is there anything wrong with any of that? Of course not- but I think there might be something wrong with it for me. Or, at least, suddenly being without any data in Canada- and the large amounts of thinking time I had while driving across the country- made me realize how dependent upon stimulation I’d gotten. And how starved for boredom I’d become. I realized that the idea of a night spent in my van with nothing to entertain me was terrifying. And this isn’t hyperbole; I’m not exaggerating- literally terrified me. I was facing the cold dread of a night spent… Oh, god…
READING?!!? Thinking? Looking at majestic sights and feeling emotions? Pure shudder material.
I mean, I’m making fun of myself a bit. But it’s also true! I had become an addict in the last decade or so- and not a cool ‘drugs-and-booze, living your life on the raw and dangerous edge’ kind of way. I’d gotten addicted to factory building games and YouTube. Which is, officially, the lamest kind of addiction possible. It’s true; they did a scientific study.
I don’t want to admit this, but this spring, I spent more time than I would ever tell you playing a factory building game while, on another screen, I watched a Twitch streamer play THE SAME FACTORY BUILDING GAME. True story, but when I decided to get rid of all my stuff, I paid my pretty decent gaming PC forward to a friends’ kid, who’s getting into that stuff, and my buddy texted me to have a laugh at this glitch in my game library, because there was no way on earth I had played a game called ‘Factorio’ for a thousand hours.
“Of course not,” I said, because it only started logging the time after I’d purchased the game, and I’d spent three years playing that fucker on an illegal pirated copy before that. And I prayed he didn’t find a game called ‘Satisfactory’ somewhere on that hard drive, because even I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve spent building shit in that game.
Why are we talking about this (other than some sort of dirty shame-spiral)? Well, this adventure is all about finding those dirty, awful comfort zones, right? All about trying to figure out why I’d gotten myself clinically depressed at a time where I should be more excited to be alive than ever. And facing an endless night in Canada without any entertainment and feeling genuine dread at it, I was pretty sure I’d found one of the reasons. And, perhaps, why it takes me so fucking long to finish my books.
THE OPPOSITE OF BORED
This is going to be a little bit disingenuous, but I’m going to let it stand. I’ve set this up to feel like a herculean, noble, movie-style rising-from-the-ashes-of-boredom hero’s journey, when it really wasn’t. I didn’t just wake up in Canada after bravely facing down a night of no entertainment and… immediately start writing more than I’d written maybe ever.
Well… Okay, that’s exactly what happened.
But to be fair and balanced (remember that bullshit?) I think my brain chemicals were lined up to give me a very good creative week no matter what- I didn’t have to struggle very hard to put my fingers on my keyboard and start. The flow state isn’t always easy for me to get into (sometimes nearly impossible, like today) but it was damn near effortless that week. I would have had a pretty good writing week no matter what, I think.
But man… I didn’t just have a good writing week. I haven’t been on fire like that in literal years. I didn’t see all that much of Vancouver because I wrote sixteen hours one day. And fourteen the next. I would drive up the Sea-To-Sky road, park my van, open the door, and leap into an imaginary place. Pause to make some coffee, pause to make some food. And then keep going. Write into the night, as the immense sky grew dark around me, the vacationers passing on the road behind, occasionally looking at the insanely spectacular view outside my van door and giving it a smile.
Nine straight days without a break- one of the most intense creative sprints I’ve had in years. I didn’t do fifteen hours a day every day- sometimes not even close- but I ran with it. Far from being a fear, the lack of internet- and connection, and distraction- became something I was looking forward to every day. There were a few afternoons and nights when, after I was done writing, I’d just sit in my kickass camp chair, look at trees, and think about what I was going to write in the morning.
God damn, but it was awesome.
A VACATION, NOT A HOME
I think this is the platonic ideal of what I’d always though a ‘real’ writer was- just this kind of thing, non-stop, 24/7/365. I had it in my head that this is how Stephen King lives his life, right? But having done it for nine straight days (and kept it up pretty good for this last week, too) I can recognize how silly of an idea that is- I mean no way can I keep this pace up for months and years. And I wouldn’t want to! It was lovely, kicking the world to the curb, ignoring friends and social media (for the most part, I got some in at coffeeshops here and there) and just staying in that flow state for as long as I could. But I started to miss my friends, even missed squawking about bookshops and street food on Insta, and, hell, it was awful nice to fire up the ‘Tubes and check in on the Marble Machine, too. I’m not going to give up on YouTube, Always Sunny, or even factory building games (well, maybe those. that’s an addiction like heroin). But I think maybe a bit of balance might be in order.
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship to balance and moderation; I admire the concept but can never seem to get the hang of either. I’m a sprinter, and then I’m a lay-on-my-ass-and-eat-cheesburgers-for-a-week-er. Zoom in close enough, and I’m never going to be anything like balanced, or moderate; for one my brain chemistry would never allow it (and god, I’ve tried), and for two I just like being a bit extreme and extravagant and I like to go hard if I go at all. But I’m starting to think- and this adventure is starting to show me- that perhaps there’s other kinds of balance, and maybe it’s okay for the slopes to be pretty steep sometimes, because if you zoom out enough, the peaks and valleys start to look like a pretty even line.
Oh wait, crap- an even line? That sounds kind of… boring.
Shit, never mind all that, then.
Thanks all; wouldn’t be here without ya. And I definitely wouldn’t be having so much fun. Hope you’re all your best inner hot canadian this week. I know I am!
Love reading these. It feels like I get to hop in the passenger seat of the van for a few minutes in my day. I really enjoy hearing about other vanners, the ups and downs, and seeing pictures of places I may never get to visit. Keep them coming.
I, too, am addicted to never being without multiple streams of entertainment simultaneously. I fear we draw closer to WALLE every day. Western Canada sounds magical.