Shane's Final Report

December 6th, 2006

Mark it up in the calendar: I'M DONE and I'm heading home! When I get home tomorrow, it'll have been 34 days straight on the road (on the project and for whom I can't mention as per the contract clause.) But suffice to say, it's all over now. And home now is Toronto, and I'm ecstatic to return - it really is a world class city, and my wife lives there, and my friends, and my cats, and my guitars, and my non-dairy rice milk stack by the fridge. You never know what you got until you're away from it for so long. Too long in this case. Thus, can't wait to touch the ground tomorrow at 2:15 EST. But before I do, some summation points to offer up.

The Trip Recap:
- Port Alberni, BC (rain and fallen tree crushes drivers legs)
- Victoria, BC (rain)
- Edmonton, AB (blizzard)
- Wetaskwin, AB (snow and cold)
- Athebaska, AB (snow and cold)
- Vancouver, BC (rain and flooding and brown water)
- Merrot, BC, BC (cold and rain)
- Chase, BC, (rain)
- Calgary, AB (record cold snap with flurries)
- Inuvik, NWT (blizzard and cold)
- Tsiigehtchic, NWT (cold like you can't explain)
- Edmonton, AB (once was enough)
- Cornwall, ON (freezing rain and snow and cold ... before we arrived it was +15)
- Ottawa, ON (snow and cold for first time all season)
- Winnipeg, MB (snow storm and cold snap)

Point 1: The West Apparently Hates Gandhi

Throughout this road trip we've encountered server winter weather everywhere we've gone. It seems to have followed us everywhere we went. We were storm makers on this trip. The sun was a distant memory. I was growing hopeless. And throughout it all, for some reason I'll never understand, throughout the Prairies, cars we're in ditches, bang ups, crash ups, mayhem everywhere. And on the winter roads here: no salt. Seriously, no salt on any road at any time. And meanwhile cars are crashed up ALL over the place - I'm not kidding here, cars just left abandoned in ditches everywhere you turn.

One day while driving in Winnipeg here, as I come to a stop light I apply the brakes and I slide forward on black ice. I'm a little worried about hitting the car stopped ahead of me as I slide towards it (note: always get zero deductible while visiting out here). but thank god the van comes to a stop right before the car in front of me makes a last minute rush through the yellow. But then as I come to a stop: BANG. A van behind us smacks into us. As we pull over and do all the form fill outs, just a little fender bender, I say to the guy, "yeah, too bad there wasn't salt on the roads here." He looks at me like I'm an asshole or an idiot, "No, it wasn't that" he tells me. What the fuck happened out here? Where did this salt hatred begin? Now I'm really curious. I've been asking around but every time I bring it up to people run in the other direction and ovoid the whole issue. Jordan had an idea for a new business out here: salt seller. We think it's going to be a big hit out here. Seriously. The cold, the snow, the ice, the whole winter for 6 months thing, the whole magical science of salt melting ice, a real cutting edge kind of development out here. It's like introducing cola to bushmen in the sahara, it's beyond essential. I'm thinking we can just fly over and drop bags of it from the planes, like food basics to war torn villages we're trying to bring over to our side of the war. You wanna bring Canada unity to the West? Well, the East apparently is going to have to start sharing or introducing the salt to the people out here. I gotta send a message to Dion.

Point 2: Museums and Galleries are for the Stupid

So, on our day "off" Jordan and I went to the meseum. I make a point of day off because that's what one of the high ups on this job I can't tell you about referred to it as, a day off. See I was done working by noon and didn't have to fly out until the next morning, so I had a day off ... in a hotel, in a town I didn't live in, living out of a bag, I had a day "off". Anyway, on this day off Jordan and I went to the National Gallery of Canada. As I had to get up early that day I hadn't showered so I had the baseball cap on. AS I entered the building with my little pass pin attached to my shit lapel, the secuity guard stopped me. "Sir, you'll have to take you hat off or turn it around backwards." What the fuck?

It turns out that many people forget that they have a baseball cap on and when then lean into look at and breathe on the work of art, they slam the front of their baseball caps into the paintings. It must happen enough that he has to warn me about it and the gallery has actually made a policy around this "issue". This is troubling. I grew up thinking that galleries were the beacon of intellectualism. I made a point of asking girls in high school out to go with me to visit the such and such exhibit (they always said no and apparently my mullet was just ahead of its time). Museums we the places in romantic movies that couples and friends went to think about and consider existence and really expand on their overall consciousness. It was a refuge, a place to elevate. Apparently not.

I also took note of two things in the gallery: one, old people go here. Is this the connection? My Dad's getting old and when we go golfing he is making a habit of hitting his ball, walking over to the other groups golf cart, and driving off oblivious. Does this explain the "baseball hat" policy? the other thing I noticed is that going to look at the art isn't enough anymore, we need someone to tell us why the work is significant and meaningful to us. I'm talking about the headsets with the behind the scenes info people are listening to for the "audio tour". I think these audio things should be used at jazz ensemble concerts. The band begins a rendition of "Take the A Train" and people nod and then put on their headsets as a pre-recorded voice tells them, "Through the ranks of Duke Ellington's Orchestra passed some of the biggest names in jazz, including Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Bubber Miley, Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Barney Bigard, Ben Webster, Harry Carney, Juan Tizol, Sonny Greer, Otto Hardwick, Clark Terry, Jimmy Blanton, Lawrence Brown, Ray Nance, Paul Gonsalves, Wellman Braud, and William "Cat" Anderson.
Many of these musicians played in Ellington's orchestra for decades, and while most were noteworthy in their own right, it was Ellington's musical genius that melded them into one of the most well-known orchestral units in the history of jazz."

I really think we can make this work on more levels. How about a running commentary while you watch the news? ("You should turn this off and read a book about these issues.") How about a audio commentary through a church service? ("Jesus was Jewish, which makes the persecution of Jewish people by Christians all the more insane, but note how the Minister is now waxing it poetic against same-sex unions.")

Point 3: Hometowns Can Be Depressing

As many people know, my hometown is Ottawa, and we had a few days on the trip in the Nation's Capital. The thing that becomes apparent as you get older is that you're permanence is nothing to the tests of time, that the buildings and the people at large and the river will continue to ebb and flow and remain, but you specifically are a goner with time and history will swallow you whole.

As I walked through the old stomping grounds of the market I remembered the times my friends and I would drive my grandmother's wooden paneled station wagon with the theme song to David Letterman blaring out the windows as we really truly celebrated our perpetual singledom. As I walked along Rideau street in front of the mall I recalled how Jordan and I would walk this same street strip with ghetto blasters on our shoulders, Metal blasting from the speakers, each of us with our own music blaring, headbands, wristbands, tight jeans, and stud bracelets - again, reveling in our singledom. I looked into the mall, I saw the same food court I would pile into during Christmas time when my dad would give me a couple bucks to go shopping for Christmas presents for everyone, before I got a job at the Bagel Shop to make my own change. Every part of the town, every building reminds me of another time. Every new building shakes me out of remembrance.

I drive down Kent street and I remember picking my Mother up after she got off work (it was the only way to have a car for the day). I remember how close we were, talking every day about everything. And now that I live in Toronto and I'm married and working all the time how we're still close but we have a lot of our own things going on. Nostalgia can be a real lump in the throat creator.

I remember Ottawa as my home town. I remember it as the place where I dreamed about everything I'm trying to live through now. I dreamed of everything in that place. I was born there and spent the first 20 years of my life there. And now its gone from me in a way. That's what going back and sitting in a hotel room 20 floors up will show you. That down below on all those streets, everything there is for a new group of kids, of teenagers, of people to begin and dream about their future lives. Where is the little me in all this city? Is he out there too? Thousands of them, just like me and Phil, and Duane, and Jordan, and Suzanne, and Judith, and Tony, and Leng, and on and on - are they all out there? I think they are, little newer versions of us all. And now this is their city, it isn't mine anymore, it's theirs. And in that little death I embrace Toronto more, the town of my thirties where dreams are dreamt about but are realized, are now actual: the wife, the first kid, the first home, the first car, the first big contract, the first big thing on TV, the first movie ... the first everything you can hope for in your 20's and 30's. And I know, there will be another time when I will have to look back on things and say "this isn't my job or my project or my town, it's the younger people coming up, it's their thing now." Growing old man is a real tug on the heart strings.

Don't you want to go back to tobogganing down some hill in the winter and coming home to hot chocolate and circling toys in the Sears catalogue? Don't you want to go back and walk into yourself in high school and say "you have no idea how important and great all this lousiness is, how utterly free you are at this time"? I want to go catch snakes by the pond. I want to go to the public pool and be flashed underwater from a girl that keeps smiling towards me. I want to go back and relive it all, even the tough stuff, the miserable stuff but with who I am and what I know now, I want to see it again, even though thinking about it breaks my heart.

I can remember the exact time that life would never be the same for me, when a different consciousness came upon me, the consciousness that has led me to want to write stories and make movies and make music and do anything to quench the ache of life that IS life. It was December. My father had lost the house I had to that point grown up in. I was in grade 4. The bank took the house and everything else of value and we moved from Nepean to Kanata where we found a tiny town house to rent. It was still a school day, the last day before the Christmas break in fact, and the night before we had moved into the new rental place. I woke up and it was snowing, I mean really snowing, piling up, falling down in giant flakes, the sky pitched dark, dark grey, but with this soft light falling over everything. I'm like a dog, I look out a window and I want to run out into everything and jump about. So, I put on my winter outfit and ran out into it, floating along the pathways towards the school I was going to start going to after new years. I stayed way out in the back, near the road of Roland Michner public school. Kids we're out for recess. I was this lone kid way out by himself. I stopped jumping around by myself in the snow and I watched them play from afar, wondering if any of them would become my friends and how I'd fair in the new school. As the bell rang and they all went back inside, I lay on my back in the snow, made some snow angels with the spurt of nervous and now elated energy from my body and I watched the snow fall from the sky, slow and moving to it's own gravity. I was aware then that I stand outside of a lot of things in life and I think about them, I watch people, I'm not always within the thing, I'm outside of it, considering it, trying at times to remember it forever.

And I think perhaps more than any other reason, this is why I want to have kids, to relive it all in a way. Is this normal? Are we allowed to want this? They will be their own little people, their own great people, but I wonder after every time we go for a toboggan and we come back to hot chocolate that I or Amanda makes, will I be able to hold my shit together looking at them thinking of my own Mom and Dad doing the same kinds of things for me. And if this trip has taught me anything it has been that: we repeat, we repeat, we repeat the same lives over and over ... and learning to love that, to embrace that, to say that is the way life is, there's nothing to rebel, there is only things to embrace and build.

Yeah, I'll always be that kid out in the field between school semesters playing by himself, away from the people locked more into herd, but I'm also the kid that runs home now to be with everything I hoped in my life to ever build and be apart of: my own life.

Point 4: the Positive Swing

Yes, this trip has been really tough. It's been tiring both creatively and physically. I met and saw some amazing things, and there is nothing like seeing our wondrous planet, our wondrous Canada. Pierre Elliot was right; you want to get over all this stupid regional bullshit, just get in your car and drive around Canada a bit, get out of your province. Then you'll realize that all this regionalism is just crap, we're all being played against one another so people can take advantage of that false divide so they can purport this fiction and get us to vote for their "platform" their "vision". People go on about Canada's divides, and there are certainly regional flavours, but those are to be experienced and trumpeted as a means to "look at us all, what a whacky bunch of people lucky as hell to be here on Turtle Island together."

So, as the trip ends on the job I can't tell you about, as I rally against TV, it ends with me meeting some really big TV people and getting a TV series Duane and I created closer to happening than anything that has every happened for us ever before. It could be huge, it could blow up in our faces and nothing will happen, but whatever the outcome the trips ends with us in the game, with us living the life we always dreamed we would live in our 30's. And as I end one job in which I can't give you details, I start a whole other world that I can't give names or specifics about, everything under the radar as we try to get it off the ground, but we're signing letters of understanding and we're trying to get it up off the mat. As one ends, one begins and this could be huge for us. This is the positive swing. This is where the character accepts the life they have and in accepting the curtain falls, she smiles, as light beings to stream into an otherwise dark exposure. (see magnolia, the last couple frames.)