Filed under: Uncategorized
Currently, everything we own is piled in a corner of this studio.
It could be tidier.
The morning is spent securing accommodation for the next two months, cross comparing walking distances and parking options, thinking and overthinking about logistics. It’s high season in a tourist city so this is even less fun than usual.
The irony of this platform favoured by the mobile generations, housing on demand, is that it doesn’t cope well with some of the actual challenges of being very mobile. One account locks, demanding to call or text a long dead phone number in another country to verify identity, and warns that any help request could take days to respond. A new account wants a special verification method apparently not supported by its own app. Payment keeps rebounding and an email to a bank contact reveals that all charges from the platform are automatically blocked because it’s considered too fraud prone: a special call will be needed to temporarily unlock and authorize payment.
So! Totally! Convenient!
I’ve been spending my time working through the twenty-odd museums in the metro. Last week’s involved a kind homeless man calling for an unclear parking gate to be opened and a long time in an unkempt garden surreptitiously picking little pieces of rosemary and smelling fresh limes on the tree, dodging some nesting birds that signaled attack if necessary. There was some art, too, but instead of attempting to light it in a way that wouldn’t cause damage to the pieces a decision was made to largely show the collections in a fairly dark old mansion where I was the sole guest over the morning. It was a good time.
This apartment is proximate to things like: a wine and liquor store with a collection so impressive buying my standard table wine feels very transgressive, steam punk themed dining, dive bars that aren’t really dive bars (evidenced by a curated local hot sauce selection on demand), a store that sells flowing linen clothes during its own happy hour (bless this land of relaxed laws), art galleries and shops full of eclectic homewares.
Last week, a coffee shop I go to for the free-donuts-with-coffee-on-Fridays was serving CBD infused cream donuts.
Sometimes, instead, I skip over to another neighborhood. The one with the wholesale spices and good samosas, the one with the touristy harbour, the fancy one where everyone looks like they’re dying on the inside of constipation or maybe just too hungry.
The city life pulls us back in a bit. In another life we’d grown so used to having whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it, sitting patiently on our doorstep. Used to the sounds of density, the smell of piss on the sidewalks. It’s everything moving as quick as you can catch it, if you want to. Newness and relative anonymity, never having to eat the same thing or having to drink at the same bar.
But on a weekend heading up the coast as soon as the air changes, another tug. Everything is replaced by the simple familiar. It’s the same lady who’s always at the butcher, the friends who come by for a quick meal and a drink without a lot of planning, the land where the only constant sound is ocean. Breakfast eavesdropping on bits of local gossip. pretending to read the entire Sunday paper.
After all these years of back and forth there’s only one definitive conclusion.
It’s probably never going to be the suburbs.
A millenial pink can of 11.5% stout that promises peanut butter, chocolate chip and marshmallow pastry flavours. Three loose were the same as a six so of course there are now five more in the fridge.
It’s election week in the homeland. For a policy nerd, the campaigns have been underwhelming and a bit sad. Even the scandals have made leaders look like flaccid peanut butter sandwiches, leftover at the bottom of a bag lunch, that no one really wants. If one more person flogs a niche tax break*, I swear, I’m coming back there and moving into a swing ward and voting like an angry hen. Like, I’m going to tick boxes on boxes and have so much government issued ID you won’t be able refuse, you might even want me to vote twice (but I’ll say no because that’s illegal).
The actual results are going to be interesting, less so because they will represent a real voter sentiment of shared new ideals and more because no one seems to know what might happen. There are high profile, well funded independents. Some minority parties are having last minute surges in approval ratings. I’ll be eating my sunrise breakfast, many time zones ahead, and watching the votes tally.
*I’m here to tell you, if you take one thing away from reading this entire blog over the last ten years, it should be that niche tax breaks are terrible tax policy and even worse government policy. They’re incredibly inefficient to administer and largely misunderstood by the voting public in terms of value, they are effectively purchasing votes at an overall cost to the system. When that politician comes to you with a niche tax credit, or deduction, in hand you say confidently to that person “I only deal in marginal rates, and kindly get off my porch.”
Filed under: when I grow up
Beside me in the cafe, two men speak earnestly about weight loss. Both are already fairly thin, one is talking about the group of friends he meets to swim all the time. I’m near a new tech company campus, a company that isn’t really operating in this country yet. The building could be anywhere in the world, a fairly ugly glass mixed use number with courtyards and benches.
“I mean, I’ve even stopped eating bread,” one says, a tone like he is delivering a project report in a conference room.
I am brainstorming about tax planning questions, tapping them into my phone line by line, as the coffee makes my mind from marbles into pinballs. I came here to see this development and drink some chain store coffee at the chain that doesn’t charge extra for non-dairy milk. My loyalty is cheaply purchased.
*
Out the window of this apartment is a stack of concrete with rebar curling out of it like claws. A project that’s been standing untouched for a long time now, water pooling between the floors. Through the gaps, where there should be walls, there’s a view of the freeway and the suburbs built up into the mountains. I can picture the marketing for this building, the one I’m in now.
Upstairs, the views are panoramic, sea in one direction and mountains to the other, but the rooftop swimming pool and gym are dirty and unused. At some point, someone had a vision of this being a bustling common space. Even if it was a narrow vision of Attractive Amenities for the purposes of maximum sale value per Square Foot.
*
We go to a place where an internet map tells us there will be dessert. It’s all clean bright white bricks and long wood bench tables. A co-working / yoga gym / food stall place with bike racks and a microbrewery underneath a stack of luxury apartments.
The guy who takes the order looks exhausted. It’s not busy but he’s getting a series of delivery orders streaming in automatically. He asks if it’s okay that it will take more than twenty minutes, we wait. Everything costs a bit more than it should but it’s all so pleasant.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“Wait, is that who I think it is?” she messages back. What I’d sent her was a link and something with some short, shocked profanity.
“Yes, that’s him.”
I learned about it because I opened an email newsletter and there was a collage of women killed in domestic violence incidents so far this year. I’ve never met her, but I recognized her picture immediately and then I searched his name.
And then, somewhere from deep in the amygdala, my body physically vibrated until it wanted to stop.
Other than a number of coded messages by way of charges, nothing is public. Not how, not why, not if the two very young kids were in the house when the police came. Just two people and some brief legal facts.
*
I remember meeting him, the first time we went out, what we talked about driving home in his car, all these small moments from the first months we were together. I met his friends and family really early and was struck by how close they all were. He left to travel and once in awhile I’d get far away phone calls, we were too young and busy for distance. He came back, suddenly, almost two years later, with a gift in hand; I was happy to hear from him. Over the next couple of years we were off and on, usually living in different places, usually dating other people. Sometimes I was serious about him, sometimes he was serious about me, but it never really solidified.
I had moved on when we somehow got back in touch. He was back in town and a little lost, a lot of my friends had moved away, and we started to hang out platonically. We’d visit his parents, make dinner together after going to the farmers market, drive up to his family cottage on the weekends. In some ways, our relationship as friends looked more like an actual relationship than the years we’d spent dating. Life was pulling me away from that city, though, and he helped me pack my house one more time and was the last person I said goodbye to before I left, waving me off at the station.
Our friendship ended about half a decade ago because it felt like he couldn’t let go of the idea maybe one day we’d get back together. I understood his position, we were really close in a lot of ways for a long time and had always had a lot of chemistry, but it felt unfair to my relationship to have someone in the background hoping that I’d end up available again, and it felt like maybe he needed space from us so he could be available to love someone else.
I look back through it all for evidence of a big, ominous sign, or even little hints. Truly, there is not a single moment I ever recall him being threatening or controlling, or even really harmful to me in any way. He wasn’t the type to make mean comments or to take his anger out on people around him. He respected boundaries, looked for them even; one of the first things I remember liking about him were his manners. He was good to his sister, his mother and the girlfriends of his friends, and loved by all of them. From the first time we met, I felt deeply comfortable in his presence, it’s likely a big part of the reason he was always easy to go back to.
*
Somewhere along the way, though he and I were no longer in contact, I became aware of her presence and I watched from a distance as they took holidays and had kids. There was something striking about her, she looked so serene in the first pictures I saw, and she seemed like a better fit for him than me; it was like they had more in common. It made me happy to think about him having family, having someone else to spend summer weekends with at the lake. I didn’t know her but I felt connected to her, like she was taking care of someone I couldn’t take care of the same way anymore, and I wondered if some day we might meet.
We will never meet because he killed her.
Sometimes people will say that a man could not have done something because they know him well, have known him well for a long time, and it’s not in his nature. I knew, right away, in the deepest part of my animal brain that whatever I know, or knew, to be true about him remains true – but he still killed her.
Underthecurrent 