Herr Proctor offers said land for a song, but nobody wants to sing

i now know it's true what grandpa used to say: "Kid, there's just no right way to carry a giant metal seahorse... now go get Pappy some more of his "cough medicine" and a hickory switch." The seahorse is aqua-blue, in the neighborhood of 80 lbs, and just rescued from the trash heap of a dismantled playground. Having flirted with tetanus and Lime's disease, i schlepped this bug-eyed creature through a handful of Montreal quartiers to a place i have taken to calling home.

i smoked a joint before leaving the hostel the morning i found this place. Stress is not something i handle particularly well, and it was alien after a few years of avoiding it, but really it was the hemoroids that did it. A bewildered dispute with management had landed my ass in the street for a night to think things over the day before, and now it hurt to wipe. What's a $10 gotta do to get a domicile in this town? To the classifieds! There was the goodnatured Quebe, who wanted someone to split the rent with while he devoted himself to mastering the vibraphone; there was the genuine Frenchie, who was told that the refined custom of endless cheek-smooching landed on my List O' Fun a mere two or three spots below having a camel take a dump on my forehead; there was the enchanting girl working at the hostel, who will not return my emails. And then there was the McGill PhD candidate with his sparse, quiet apartment and polydactylous cat.

Suddenly i wasn't high. Maybe.

He had a Trashcan Sinatras' shirt, a Moserian assortment of Foucault, and no questions. i almost had one. When i noticed the several framed posters, i thought to ask; then i noticed the assortment of books and hesitated; then i noticed the tattoo, and declined to ask the question to which the answer was now obviously "Because I have a bizzarre and overwhelming fixation on Montgomery Clift." He'll share when the time is right.

So i moved in. Here's the thing: he's a tall, skinny guy, well-informed soley in order to better criticize everything, named Colin. There can be only one. My smoldering love for CMacD not withstanding, the battle to the death -refereed by special guest Christopher Lambert- should be quite entertaining.

For those who will read but never see, Montreal is a fine town. i'm now situated in a conduit -a veritable noman's land- between several hundred Ukrainian hacids and a plateau of militant Francophones, whose occassional calls for succession and historic willingness to murder English speakers has done wonders for rent. And yes, my front door is within a hockey rink's length of an establishment whose buzzing neon lettering, in any language, can only mean exposed vagina. Hopefully i'll have time to get back home from this internet cafe before Slang and Kev show.

And now, down south in the tropical latitudes of the upper Mid-Atlantic, puke is filling a urinal at O'Flanagans; the night's eighth Rheingold is tasting a shade less grundel-tinged than the seventh; a denuded Iranian is contemplating a tiger-adorned rug while wondering where Sam went; the same tequila used to clean knife wounds in some Juarez alleyway is lubricating the jukebox buttons on 6th St; 5-4=Unity is punched in to yield Gold Soundz; Missy is single.

But i'm here, not there. To kill the time until the convergence of a small cluster of nogoodniks and their alcoholism-enabling powers could be mustered, i used to sit alone in the dark quoting Family Guy to nobody and putting cigarettes out on my scrotum everytime the cablebox clock hit a palendrome. With you mooks in my dust, i've traded in those glory days to sip liter cans of Labbatt amongst the maple leaves and scan for signs of cosmic reassurance.

And how else to describe the relief off getting of the bus in a strange land, to be greeted by the morning sun ringing off the gleaming goatee of a 30-foot titanium statue of Eli Batalion. After the Greyhound had lightened its load of those particular dregs of society that find it necessary to bus it 150 miles to Albany before sunrise on a Monday, we made for Canada. Canada: a land where, courtesy of the Federal government's dime, Michael Ironside lent his supernova to a two-season action series with every scene shot twice -once in English, and again in French. Yes, Fred Michael speaks French. And now just membership to a self-respecting video store and a dirth of actively engaged afternoons stand between me and gruff, clipped, Richteresque fluency. See you at tha party.