CERTAIN SUMMER NIGHTS

Early morning runs afford even the drowsiest of athletes avenues of inspection that otherwise remain the domain of the peeper lurking behind the proverbial bush. Even the occasional light glowing dimly in the upper-floors of a modest two-story home at such an early hour are flashing signals that initiate the most illicit of suspicions: What is one doing up at such an hour? (The runner himself rarely asks such a question; he knows what he is doing.) Who are they doing it with? And do any of their intimates suspect the truth? All of these thoughts remain as vivid and as red as a flashing NO VACANCY sign when one is forcing the body to do what only minutes before sleep disavowed. Views from the street gain perspective and weight the earlier one runs.

Alas, the handful of lights spotted this morning in homes here and there likely allude to nothing more than the anxious patriotism of a world at war amidst football's greatest fields. Japan playing Denmark. Japan loses, Japan leaves. Japan wins, another day is won, too -- as if the sun itself would dim, then darken, if the national team left South Africa in an early exit that only confirmed the country's suspicions that they are not up to snuff at this level of play. (If such passion and pressure can still be deemed 'play'!)

Teens and college students staying up late, planning to skip school. Salarymen staggering in from the last train home only a few hours before, saying 'fuck it', grabbing a beer and flipping on the TV, another sleepless night a necessity when the World Cup demands one's full attention. Housewives with nothing better to do decide to stay asleep while their spouses and children do what men are born to do -- root.

On this morning, unlikely it is that any steamy alliances are the source and the light behind those glowing bulbs I spy in a collection of houses that serve as feeble illumination against the dominant dark. Physical passion gives way to sport. A round ball kicked repeatedly half a globe away by young men far from home keeps the country alive and alert. Empires rise and fall upon such traditions -- as do electricity bills, on certain summer nights.

EMPTINESS NEED NOT PRECLUDE MOMENTUM

The desperate times contain the leanest of moments. They also serve as the psychic springboard from which we can vault outwards and upwards towards, if not a higher height, at least a plateau on the same vista that shares a similar view. This is what one would like to believe, what we hold true in our most immature of hearts, the same way that a child holds a stuffed animal tightly to his chest in the belief that shared pain, even via imaginary characters, lessens the sting and softens the slug. If we were to believe otherwise, that down times lead only down, that the steady staircase of our torment spirals only further down, descending always, ascending rarely, if ever, then how would one make it through the day? Entropy is the name of nature's game, but we choose to look away from such a stunningly familiar fact, as if the sun (which we take notice of only in its absence or in its ever-shining arrogance) will not burn our retinas should our eyes focus on more familiar sights with less intensity and greater saccharine. One can stare at a waterfall for hours, suffering only the gentle, repeated slap of boredom and a slight deadening of the senses that even the most beautiful of sights will inevitably engender in the restless, finicky gut of our lives. (If even the most awesome of sights dulls as rapidly as an informercial cutting- knife, no wonder the world so soon lacks its lustre!)

The desperate times contain the luckiest of moments, too. It is only when the reservoir of good will and back-up strength has been depleted within us totally and completely that another layer of our humanity is uncorked. As if the light flashing empty in your car signals not the need for another injection of oil but, rather, serves as an acknowledgement that your vehicle has reached a point where forward motion is highly unlikely, so another means of automation must soon be unearthed. One thinks that a gasless car cannot move, but no! Think of how far it can be pushed! One need only open the door and allow the most burly of friends to assist you in your slow (but steady!) shove down the road. Not practical, not likely -- but possible! No gas means no quick motion, of this I grant, and perhaps it is not even technically legal to accompany an ally down a suburban road by pushing and grunting his car for hours on end.

No matter. It can be done. Emptiness need not preclude momentum. When we have reached the limit of our limit, one can all too often be shocked to discover another trap door, another secret entrance to the brave, resistant side of our psyches, a small, dim (but still visible!) room containing water, rope, aspirin, a blade. Another hole can be dug, a ladder made, a window forged. Sunlight can be seen. It will not last for long, but a glimpse of light after the longest of nights need not endure to be ennobling.

THE OTHER SIDE OF ELSEWHERE

Every day on my early-morning runs I am almost sideswiped by a long-haul truck barrelling through the night towards who knows where. This is my fault, not theirs. The hour is early; the streets are dark; my thoughts are drifting; the trucks are fast. I should be more aware, if not alert. Before sunrise, life takes on different shapes and assumes altered forms, and I am not always conscious of those mechanical beasts that share the road with my all too human awkwardness. Suddenly turning a corner, they seem strong and I feel weak. Perched at a stoplight, these trucks look like sullen beasts tied to a stake, their revving engines more like the frustrated growl of a bulldog itching to pounce than a manmade device emitting its hum. These cannot be mere trucks. Under the moonlight, they seem almost elemental, forces of nature's darker allies, modern cyborgs, merged mutations of metal, animal, and everything else that lies within man and beast.

Of course, they are trucks.

Who are their drivers? And who is waiting for them on the other side of elsewhere? I've never managed to catch even the slightest glimpse of a recognizably mortal form behind the oversized wheels they twist and turn throughout the unending night. Who drives who -- the truck or the man?

How lonely such a night must be! From here to there and back again, always on a tight, strict, deadline, delivering essential goods to indifferent employees, their fellow, waiting watchmen of the night who mask their lifelong yawns behind girlie mags and take-out dinners. One living on the road, indefinitely; the other slumped behind a desk in uniform-blue, eternally, occasionally wondering: if this is life, than what, dear god, is death? After-hour highways stacked with racing messengers, racing against life's clock. Sleepily realizing: The jig is up, because the clock aways wins.

Unless there's only one truck. Sometimes I believe this. Day in, day out, the trucks I see, the rigs I spot, blend into one another like waves the sea. Any distinctions are irrelevant. One truck, one life, seems identical to another. Perhaps there is only one driver for all of Japan, humanoid in form, barren in spirit, genetically engineered to do what humans cannot: endure a life of unending motion.

This could be the reason why I've yet to see a face in front of the windshield's glare. There is no face to be seen. If I wave a hand in a friendly wave, I will receive no reciprocal, perfunctory acknowledgement. (Robots don't do small-talk.) The truck will maintain its path through the end of the night. I will keep running. The path of our mutuals days is actually a closed-loop, only simulating change, merely replicating the exterior of difference, abolishing any nuance. The two of us will not meet again. Until the next morning, when it begins all over again, for the first time.

TASTING NUMBERS (Part II)

For a few moments he wanted to stay in bed and linger over the numbers, roll them around his mouth, chew them with as much ease and relaxed satisfaction as a sneaky child munching candy on the sly, far from the stern gaze his rigid parents. (Who among us does not want to ease into, and endure, such moments for as long as possible?) However, as clearly as the numbers tasted to him -- as startlingly fresh and vital as cold river water on a hot summer's eve -- clear, too, was the realization that the world was waiting. Out there. For him. Something to see and taste around every corner.

Within seconds after this realization Brody was up, showered, dressed and out the door, almost in a single bounce of joy and glee and simple possibility. He wondered if this was how the most content of rabbits must feel as they hippity-hopped their short little lives away amidst a forest of grass and green. Today's day was a beautiful day -- sunny and vibrant. The city was still quiet, as it should be at five after five on a Sunday morning. The occasional red newspaper delivery truck rounded a corner every few moments as Broday walked along, wandering nowhere. As he studied the stack of rope-bound newspapers that hurtled through the air, he wondered if the newsprint, too, seen from a distance, would have a certain tangible taste. If numbers could open up a world of delectable possibilities, perhaps letters, too, had their own intrinsic nourishment?

Brody stopped at the corner of 15th and Haverly, a few blocks up from his apartment, suddenly struck by a thought that was both tantalizing and more than a little stunning. (He was 'stunned' often, Brody was.) What if it all went away? Even now, with the fresh air feeling good and clean as it cleansed out his sleep-struck throat, he realized that he hadn't tasted any numbers for a good two, three minutes. He shut his eyes and tried to get a grip on fifteen, a grasp of twenty-six, a little nibble of ninety-two. Nothing. Not even an aftertaste. (Or was it more like a foretaste?) Perhaps those rocking moments of only a few minutes ago (had it been so short a span?) were merely the remnants of the certainty that one acquires only after the deepest and truest sleep. The world's problems have been solved, the atom has been split, the Torah decoded and comprehened once and for all. The pillow, in that weirdly magnificent realm where sleep ends and awakeness starts to intrude, is the garden on which one plants the fruit of eternal knowledge. Until you lift your head and open your eyes.

Had he taken himself for a ride?

THE VERY AIR

Canadians -- as we will offhandedly, nonchalantly, repeatedly, insistently inform you -- are a modest people. We don't waste our time waving the flag, or plastering the maple leaf onto our rear bumpers. We never brag about the greatness of our vast nation to groups of uncomfortably fidgeting strangers who nod politely, robotically. There is not an iota of hubris or vanity hurtling through our bloodstreams on its way to our underinflated psyches. (Indeed, we may not even be sure what, precisely, 'iota' refers to! No flaunting our intellectual prowess -- not us Canucks.)

We know who we are: simple (though not stupid) people.

Or so we tell ourselves, and often others.

Every country is a world of one. Canada's universe is one that relies on the wilderness to garnish our national myth. Even those us raised in cities, reared in strip malls and concrete, feel an elemental, even mystical pull towards the rivers and the trees, a tug-of-war between who we are becoming in this electronic age, and the past that keeps bringing us back to where we started. (This is what we remind ourselves.)

One wonders if the concrete, physical content of the earth -- its dust and soil, its rock and weed, the sap of its trees and the chill of firm, packed snow -- has somehow been integrated, over time, into our actual DNA. How little we understand of ourselves! It's not outrageous to assume that one sperm and one egg, remnants of even the most lacklustre lay, somehow passed along into each of us some environmental gene that mutated upon itself after generations spent sucking in and breathing out the very air of our Canadian north.

What else, after all, do we have going for us, if not the inherent synthesis of ourselves and our land?

To the outdoors we must return and retreat.

A not altogether ecstatic destination, for us 21st century pioneers, because there is something almost sinister about such a story, the national story, the story of a nation known all around the globe for the beauty of its nature. For if we link ourselves in a chain that extends from coast to coast, wrapping us so tightly in the grip of our outdoors, certain reminders of life's debt to the outdoor life gradually emerge even as we grip each other's hands all the harder.

Is it not to the earth that we return, in the end? Does not the dirt welcome home us home, finally? (Even ashes are inevitably returned to the ground or flung into the sea.) Perhaps our attachment to all things green and brown originates from an earthier, more basic place, that practical aspect of our interior life, our own individual physical plane, that intuitively recognizes that the harshness of a life in the outdoors leads, ultimately, to one place, and one place only.

Americans may have their 'manifest destiny', forever seaching for that bigger, brighter, better place that lies ahead just a little further west, beyond the next mountain, across the higher hill, but we have a destiny that tends to dampen any oversized ambitions. One that instills a kind of modest, morbid, reserved modernity.

We can't get excited about all that much. The dark forest is closer than we know. The wind is fierce. The snow doesn't seem to be stopping. Spring is far off, but it will come, short as it may be. There is that.

Usually, that's enough.

TASTING NUMBERS (Part I)

Brody awoke to the oddly metallic taste of numbers on his tongue. At first he believed it was blood -- this tangy, tart sensation that reminded him of the time he had fallen head-first down a slide during the distant but potent days of his childhood, around seven or eight, his nose bonking the edge of the curved metal and his mouth gargling the foaming red nostril spray that, secretly, despite the resulting, obligatory tears and snot-fuelled sobs, he found sweet, almost comforting.

Now he was an adult, and he did not want to taste blood. It hinted at all that was yet to come. But this particular taste, on this specific morning, was one that he rolled around in his mouth while his eyes still adjusted to the weak, almost timid morning light that gradually snuck its way between the blinds, like a shy girl sticking out her tongue in the general vicinity of her class crush.

I can taste a seven, he thought, spry and lively. That's at the edge of my mouth, the right hand side, just above the tooth that I think I'm going to have to get yanked soon. And four -- I can feel you, too! At the tip of my tongue, balancing on the edge, cool as a November night after six. Ah, and nine! You taste like someone has sneaked some rum into my coke! Right on the underside of my tongue, a hidden gem that will leave a spry, mournful aftertaste.

None of this made sense, of course. Morning thoughts never do. But in this nonsensical assemblage of numbers and tastes, thoughts and sensations, he found a clarity that had been missing for months, possibly years. Some secret of the cosmos had chosen itself to be revealed to him here, at this time, in this frumpy bed. All those mathematicians jumbling numbers around! Numbers only! Don't they realize the connections that exist between the most unlikely of allies?

AGAIN, ALWAYS, FOREVER

"Woe unto him who seeks to please rather than apall."

-- Herman Melville


The writer's role is to spit snot into your face and make you think that by the time it trickles down your face and touches your lips you're tasting taffy. Or, put more delicately, the author's responsibility is to pour fountains of Mountain Dew over your head on the hottest day of the year, and gradually make you realize that the sweet, piercing goodness that tantalizes your tongue is also slowly, intently dehyrdating you of your spiritual essence.

Either definition will suffice.

The problem becomes that our essential nature as human beings is that we are not defiant. We long for comprehension. We seek the simple solution because that is the most palatable one. Perhaps the neurological railway routes that line the grey and fleshy pockets of our brain tissue are physically built that way, inborn. The easiest way to comprehend is by finding a way to agree. Oh, to be certain, we are rebels; that is our novice, initial reaction. However, after a moment, a month, a year, a decade, a life, we acquiesce. (Giving way is so much more conducive to relaxation than uprising against invisible, ultimately unimportant ideological foes.) Somebody hands us a pamphlet. We nibble on an extra-spicy chicken, ignore the saucy red drool dripping down our chin, and eventually decide that whoever wrote this baby had a pretty good point. Fold it, trash it, back to the tube.

The novelist's role is to light off tiny little cherry bombs inside of our skulls and patiently stick around to see if, and when, they do their little damage. This does not mean that provocation is an end in and of itself; rather, that tiny expolosions of disturbance, couched in insight, eventually can lead to a bigger bang of comprehension. We read to escape loneliness and instead are faced with a greater threat than mere solitude. The larger issue becomes: We are alone, and not only are you not correct in your assumptions, but the answers are nowhere to be found, and your friends cannot help you, and may, in fact, be the true source of your isolation.

Such is one means of assault.

The other tactics employed by the most skillfull of scribblers are ones that would be not unwelcome in the most dingy of massage parlours, those places where rubs and smacks are but preludes to a longer, seedier embrace. You are coddled and made to feel enveloped by means of tactile, fleshy fingers that probe and pinch. (And what can more be heartening and alienating than the hug of a stranger?) The world is nasty, yes, but a refuge is to be found, such hands seem to be saying: You can stop here. You may rest here. The universe is aligned only with you and your psychic pain, and for that I have a cure. No unwelcome shocks or lightly tossed grenades.

And so one is gradually seduced into a view of the world that reaffirms one's own sense of self. A chaotic, uncertain realm still lies mere metres outside the oriental curtain, but an order to one's body has been restored. One can face the world head-on, like a wrestler entering the ring, confident of success because the end result has been preordained long before the lights have been raised and the great gates opened. [

It is only later, at home, resting in bed, remembering strange hands touching familiar places, that a certain pain sets in. An ache here. A sting there. One has become acquainted with physical discomforts that emerged only from the most tender of touches. Pain and pleasure are intermingled to such a degree that one can not discern which is stronger, or more likely to last well into the night.

That need to comprehend, to relax, to crash out on the couch, has been subverted in the most clever of ways, by means of an insincere sincerity, or a sincere insincerity, I'm not sure which. We are either exploded into another level of comprehension, or eased into a supple state that hides a firmer, creakier truth.

When I read a book and don't know what to make of it, or feel a strong sense of unease at the pit of my stomach, where last night's dinner waits to arise, or think thoughts that make me wonder if know anything at all, or ever will, I feel oddly elated and disgusted, and long for such a reaction again, always, forever.