Over the course this here last most recent week that we've had, I've been too busy to do more than jot down a few observations. And here they are.

A FEW OBSERVATIONS

First: observe - c.1390, from O.Fr. observer, from L. observare "watch over, look to, attend to, guard," from ob "over" + servare "to watch, keep safe," from PIE base *ser- "to protect." In M.E., "attend to in practice, keep to;" sense of "watch, perceive, notice," is c.1560, via notion of "see and note omens." Meaning "to say by way of remark" is from 1605.

I just thought I'd start with a bit of etymology. I like the idea that by observing the following things I am in some sense guarding and watching over them. For example:

1. Billy Ocean. There are large questions out there and there are small ones, but perhaps the tiniest question of all is: what spurred Billy Ocean's success? I was thirteen or so when "Caribbean Queen" (Caribbean Queen/ Now we're sharing the same dream/ We're two hearts that beat as one/ No more love on the run) came out, sounding precisely like "Billie Jean" - from that shuffly R & B beat to the fricking title. Why did millions of people decide to go out and groove to a song that, for all intents and purposes, already came out only two years before? And then continue to groove to tunes ("There'll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry)," "When the Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going)," "Get Out of My Dreams (Get Into My Car)") as bleached of personality as those white suits that Ocean always wore? If any proof of the man's utter mediocrity were needed, let it be known that he wrote songs for LaToya Jackson before his U.S. chart-topping period. I swear, the man was visibly projecting his career arc into an eventual run of gigs at resort casinos. It's like he telegraphed his punches and we took them blissfully, full on the jaw. And then we danced all night to the sound of those Stax horns.

2. Beautiful Scenery. When I was a very young boy we visited my cousin, who lived about three-four hours drive from us, who, as I've mentioned in a previous entry, shot me in the leg, played knuckles with me until my hands were swollen, and who, when we were too old to play knuckles, stole my girlfriend. The drive back was usually the best part of the trip, but once my parents decided to take the scenic route (Or rout, as in "Wellington delivered to Napoleon's troops a scenic rout"). We wandered for hours through picturesque Nova Scotia towns, each quainter than the last. It was agonizing. We already lived in a picturesque Nova Scotia town. A sign outside the town where I grew up called it a "Hamlet-by-the-Sea".

Now that I'm older, and I need swift motion and novelty to expand and sustain those moments which come effortlessly to children, I would probably drive the scenic route as well. But I'm thinking that scenic routes are necessary to sustain our notions of 'natural beauty,' which is to some extent a fantasy. Someone who travels widely, not for pleasure but out of necessity, will confirm that the great majority of landscape is incredibly ugly. There are huge swathes of this Earth which consist of near-featureless plain, stunted pine, twisted undergrowth, gnat-infested swamp, ruddy-shrubbed muskeg, rock-and-sand lunarity, splintered granite and river slime. "Scenic" and "scenery," with their connotations of the theatre, actually derive from the Greek skene, meaning "tent" or "booth," derived in turn from skia, "shadow," or "something that gives shade". The scenic route is something that provides shade or relief, not the unforgiving moss-and-rock barrens or gold desert. When we take the scenic route we are keeping to the shade.

There's also the sense that the scenic is not entirely natural, that people have worked to make it so. The scenic route is often the older route, keeping to the coastline and passing through older communities. Modern roads tend to plough their way in more or less direct lines from one major centre to the next, blasting their way through granite passes and vaulting over older roads. Of course, the older route was once just as utilitarian, when commerce and travel took place on a more local scale; this sense of the almost-recapturable past becomes quaint, becomes beautiful, offering itself to the viewer like a display in a circus tent or a roadside booth: hence, scenic. Last October I drove along the edge of the barrens on Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula and I began to get a sense of what land is like without human intervention, without modernity or antiquation. For two or three hours we drove, and aside from the highway there was nothing. No trees. fields. No houses. No intersections or helpful signs. Just a two-lane road and telephone poles held up by wooden box frames. Even a decade spent on the prairies hadn't prepared me for this emptiness. I used to think that multi-acre fields of wheat and flax were empty, but now they seem crowded and textured next to the barrens. Nothing but hills of sharp bare rock and moss-covered ground. The nearest thing I've ever seen to it is probably the springtime scenes from Atanarjuat.

3. Speaker Phones. The only reason to call from a speaker phone is to pretend or maintain the pretense that you're calling from a tin bucket or a sealed drum of some kind. Obviously, your reasons are your own, and I am not one to judge. But I hate holding phone conservations with someone who's clearly been curled up in a ball and stuffed into a tin bucket. Please extricate yourself first. Unless you need help getting out of your bucket.

4. Vu jade. Today I found that rarest of things: a truly new and useful phrase. It's vu jade, the opposite of deja vu. It's the sense that a given experience is completely alien to anything preceding it. The usual reaction to vu jade, according to Freud and the Freudettes, is "gigantic and senseless fear". I came across vu jade in a capsule description of the 1996 crash of AeroPeru 757 Flight 603. After a preflight washing the crew neglected to remove a few inches of tape from the left-side 'static port' sensor tubes. Soon into the flight the instruments began to go crazy. Alarms sounded and lights all over the cockpit began to blink. As far as the crew could tell, the plane appeared to be flying normally, but every intsrument insisted otherwise. The automatic pilot began to wrench the craft around in the sky, trying to align its flight path with the information it was being fed. When the plane finally crashed in the Pacific the altimeter thought the plane was cruising at 10 000 feet. The author of the book I was reading supposes that the hapless crew must have been experiencing a wicked case of vu jade.

5. Gophers.Somewhere in Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi the narrator talks about the great number of animals hidden in a city. He says:

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you would be amazed at the number of animals that fall out. It would pour more than cats and dogs, I tell you. Boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, piranhas, wolves, lynx, wallabies, manatees, porcupines, orang-utans, wild boar - that's the sort of rainfall you could expect on your umbrella.

That kind of menagerie may suit Tokyo, but in Regina you get cats, dogs, and gophers. A rain of gophers. A furry storm of the little guys with the tails and the black eyes and the worried looks. You'd get a deluge, a Biblical punishment for upending the city. You see them moving on hillsides here and they look like pieces of trash caught in a strong wind, rolling down the hill. The gophers here have a job: they make holes in the ground. The humans' job is to kill as many of them as possible. Lately this province has started holding "gopher derbies," rewarding those who hand in the most gopher tails and thereby prove themselves to be the mightiest gopher hunters of all. Tails can be cut off with a knife, but the easiest method is to spin the gopher rapidly over your head by the tail. The gopher body shoots off into the undergrowth and you have your proof of purchase in hand. I bid you all a good weekend.

parode - exode