Before heading to the airport, I grabbed a few books, including Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (the pleasingly compact clear cut press edition). It wasn’t until halfway through my flight to Vancouver that I realized that the book is largely about Vancouver. Strange synergy. Then I noticed a boarding pass tucked near the back of the book, documenting another flight from Calgary to Vancouver, in 2005. It occurs to me that I’ve been reading this book, in transit, for years. There are passages I must have read many times, I don’t remember particulars, but the book has become luxuriously familiar, a constant, I can dip into it at any point, it continues. On this reading,

“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs…”

called up Lyn Hejinian’s “A pause, a rose, something on paper.” But only briefly. It carries on:

“Thickets, a cave, a hut of boughs are the components of landscape that conventionally provide primordial coverage. Structurally the shack is a thickening, a concentration, an opacity in the lucid landscape.”

Elucidation of surfaces, space, enclosures: shacks, and scaffolding:

“When an immobile building, inevitably bored of its environment, wants a new site, a scaffolding can be constructed around it. Scaffolding substitutes for a site. By compression or condensation it transforms an atmosphere to a condition of access which is also a screen. The idea is easily inflated towards the surreal or the homeopathic, but it is based on observation. When at night we hear the scaffolding rustle, then look up to watch it sway, we feel voyeuristic longing. In darkness the scaffolding is foliage. Sometimes swinging on special leafy scaffolds we feel compelled to loose our little slipper.”

– Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

We have floundered and basted. Our portions have multiplied. We are sated but repenting. We are lost to our innermost rhythm. Our senses are surfeit. Our form is buffeted.

A light pulse has led us sparing. We have not sought stability. Our uncertainty has charmed us. We are as a gluttonous lover. And yet we have been wrenched. We have contorted. We atone.

Flimsy surrenderings bait us. Stubborn thickets spring to our mercy. Sabotage entices our lean baselessness. We hover fearing.

Our signal is a study in calm. Loop upon loop has cocooned. We have endeared ourselves to our other selves. Our clamour subsides. We are burgeoning.

"The Calgary Arts Development authority could be eliminated as well. Allow individuals to fund that through their charitable donations," he said.

So Calgarians can choose between property tax hikes of 23% or whatever ridiculous number they're suggesting, or the sudden complete elimination of municipal support for the arts.

Nice.

Living in this city has been bothering me lately. It's so frustrating to live in the strongest economy in the country (assuming that's still true) with grotesquely overvalued real estate affecting everyone's access to accommodation, rented or owned, to drive on crumbling streets, to negotiate an overlooked and clearly inadequate transit system, to suffer extremely limited access to medical attention because no doctors are taking new patients, to watch gang activity flourish for lack of funding for the police, and to not even have an independent bookstore in the downtown core to frequent, not to mention a decent coffeeshop open later than ten in the evening. I feel as though we sacrifice so much here to the culture of oil and gas -- all this city's resources are directed towards making money from oil. Which is sad, but not likely to change. What I don't understand is why can't all that oil money at the very least alleviate some of the problems that could handle some money being thrown at them? Why can't they hire more police? Attract more doctors? Fix the goddamn roads? Buy a few more buses? Shouldn't all that revenue be able to shield us from massive cuts to the already underfunded arts authority, or from further inflation of our overinflated property values? Why is this city so hopelessly self-destructive?

Something defensible stands in the way. Clearly standing in the way. Clattering the way. It’s standard. It’s manifested in doubles. It tremors with solidity. With its sense of its solidity. It’s knowing itself to be right. It’s beyond questioning. It’s standing in the way. It’s a block. It’s a limit of acknowledgment. It’s the limits of lines. Dark heavy lines. Because they don’t bleed. Something is logical and true. It’s tracing its own trajectory. It knows how it got there. It could get back. It could move forward. It sees paths. It sees its own way. Something obvious is blocking the way. It’s too obvious. It’s surface and leap. It covers and smoothes. It doesn’t feel any contradictions. It doesn’t need to justify. Something implausible is coating the way. It varnishes everything. It’s easy to overlook. It’s impossible to see. It’s actually nothing out of the ordinary. It’s easy enough to choke on. It’s a fine dust. It shouldn’t even bother you. It’s not really in the way. Something overbearing obscuring the way. How do you know that’s the way? There’s no way of knowing the way. It’s taking the way. It’s not necessarily even that way. It could be any way. Do you even know there is a way? Something is taking the way.

Hey Alberta artists, why not fill out the Alberta Foundation for the Arts survey?

What I realized at yoga today: a huge part of the appeal of smoking is taking deep, slow breaths, holding until it almost hurts, then exhaling smoothly right to the bottom of your lungs. The nicotine is nice but not necessarily the whole point. Or am I remembering smoking wrong?