Through Axis café’s garage-door front, from beside a piece of art called Red Ginger, that I do not understand but has a feel of the exotic east, I see into the street. There are small slow movements at this hour. And the light that reflects off the bus moving by is lower and softer now.

Today I had a mind to rail against Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin—hailed now by a segment of Christians as prophets—and the weekend’s mimetic spectacle of the Restoring Honor rally and its unembarrassed leeching off of King’s I Have a Dream speech. But the real talent, that I do not yet possess, is how to exit the fascination that such a virtual gathering generates. The weary worship and hollow revival of the rally, the subsequent press squabble, the precipitous parodies, the retrenching of conservative and liberal—all so predictable and noncreative—still, and always, suck us into the perception that we are actively contributing to the righteousness of the world.

Instead I rehearse an ancient idea: To sit, and wait for a word from the edge; to walk, and wait to understand the mercy of the coming fall, the mercy of September air and the graceful uncertainty of September clouds.

To learn to read the signs at least as well as the clouds will be enough: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The fall of all that Americ-esque a will be a mercy to the earth and her dwellers. The smaller fall, through rehearsed waiting, of my ambition, jealousies, and greed, will be present mercy for me.

Sometimes, after a holiday has crested and is ebbing, and I feel melancholia descend upon me like dense smoke settling over a city; you know, it’s the feeling you get after seeing too much beauty…a kind of phantasmal reality, like you’re alone inside a small grey membranous dome, and beyond the gluey gauze are apparitions you hope are only people moving about, and time is all out of joint, and you are certain your brain is blotting paper, and you begin to pine in your own pooling pathos, and ruth is nowhere to be found, and you reach for Bukowski’s poetry of lime and asphalt…

                                 …well, when this happens the only thing that keeps me going is remembering the words on the back of my grade five report card written by my teacher—that would be Mrs. Barber who’s son Ricky had a fastball pitch that sounded like the crack of a whip when it hit the catchers mitt; a pitch rivalled only by left-handed Damon Kondroe’s hardball overhand. I can see Damon now, he would arch back until his arm was on the verge of breaking, and then, after holding motionless…for one second…his body would unwind—from the ball of his cleated right foot to his snapping left wrist and unfurling fingers—and release a red-seamed white bullet that would explode like a rifle shot behind a bewildered batter. Damon played for my home town, the Springside Combines, but not all the time because he was, they said, erratic, like Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills, or, I suppose, the giant stone outside of Okotoks, Alberta, misplaced—mysterious as to placement. He went on to an unknown future. Like Lillian Moscow who I had an immense crush on and who lived in a small house along the village’s north road, but who followed her own road of arbitrary direction, and when I met her by chance a few years after we were out of high school, she was still a year older than me—and as alluring—and all those wet-palm school days came back to me like a line from an old song remembered, “You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!”

        —a song we used to sing on the island, like an anthem, and we’d bend and twist our limbs and face-pose through the guitar solo, and then sing again, sing with Ken Sharp who is now the proprietor of that song, who came back, after our geographical and socio-conceptual migration that scattered most of us, except Ken, who bought the Springside Hotel and renamed it, and where there is, whether full or not, "plenty of room," and room too in our home town (there being still only a few hundred people) where Damon pitched hardball, and we flipped our cars on back roads, stuck potatoes in exhaust pipes, tipped the "honey wagon" on Halloween, learned to inhale, dreamed about what waited for us west on Highway 16, watched Sunday morning sunrise’s in hay fields through bug-spattered windshields, fell down, got stuck, left, returned, settled, remembered grade school and Mrs. Barber—who, as I was saying, wrote this on the back of my report card: "Doesn’t seem to pay attention, daydreams and looks out the window, but usually gets his work done."

Inspired by a box of love letters discovered by House’s granddaughter, Andrea, Forget Me Not is one of those heartbreaking odes to memory, love and loss, with blockbuster novel or film written all over it.

Read the entire review here:

Andrea House and Dana Wylie

Photo Edmonton Journal

I do not study fungal colonies growing on nutrient-rich agar plates, I lean low with my camera, knees in dirt and dead leaves, to capture this bit of wonder: August mushrooms brought on by July rains.

Fruiting body erupts from the soil suddenly—round cap pushes up through layer-cake loam—a small mound of desire. You notice the full hips, the botox-smooth brow, the parted fluting beneath, and the salt-hair smell of spore, or earth, or both—the effulgence of fungi—the sexual and asexual mystery of mushrooms—waiting for replication from within or waiting to burst into the thick air to be taken afield or abroad.

And yet the mushroom in all its wonder is simply the garishly flocculent and sometimes tasty rumour of a galactic secret kept within a mat of micro-threads, a network of hyphae crossing the earth’s continents and oceans.

Imagine the planet, sentient. It’s easy if you try, that is, if you try to reenter the imaginative innocence of your forgotten childhood. Imagine, perhaps, the earth, a bottle-nosed dolphin swimming in an ethereal yet viscous vacuum. Imagine the rain forests as its great lungs, oxygenating the wild blue currents of air, giving strength to the wind and gathering rains as they break open upon the land, running over the greening soil and back into the capillaries and veins that return to the sea. Imagine the sea, the heart, its cleansing and constant beating tides raising vast blankets of mist and fog that dewily sink and settle upon soft ground. And imagine the ground, the loam and loess, as the sleek body of the dolphin that hosts a sensorial instrument—alive and intricate and capable of a kind of intelligence that we, with our own tool-oriented intelligence, remain mostly ignorant off.

And it is this vegetative part of fungi, the out-of-sight mycelium mat living in top six inches of most of the earth’s soil, that, while still  outside of our powers of comprehension, may yet save us from the many wounds we’ve cut into the earth. This mycelium, which Mycologists tell us we’re closer to than plants, has the ability to reconstitute our stressed and polluted land.

Here on this slip of earth, I crouch by the Amanita muscaria that has sprung from mycelium-map, bewitching and alluring and poisonous—but rarely fatal. It’s growth, I speculate with reason, connected to an amanita in Argentina and a morel in Morocco—all so connected, we of the earth.

Published in the Edmonton Journal last weekend.

Dedicated to Thomas Merton.

The screen mounted on the restaurant wall tells me that it’s another anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Fifty thousand dead, it says, many of those 50,000 were vaporized; and over the next few days another 50,000 died of radiation sickness. There are pictures of a commemoration service with very old Japanese people—bomb survivors we’re told—asking us not to forget.

Also at lunch, we are informed that Robert Pickton’s interrogation tapes have been released—11 hours worth. Some of the victim’s families are choosing to watch the tapes, with the hope, reads the closed-caption, of finding closure.

There are floods in Pakistan, the worst in recent history, we are told, caused by a jet stream sweeping down and around an amplified upper ridge; the same upper ridge that is causing a heat wave in Russia which has made it difficult to control large fires south of Moscow, where residents are breathing smoke polluted air that is six times above levels considered safe.

(Louis Farrakhan and John of Patmos warned us of this.)

In the mean time the Royal Bank of Canada is taking a moment to tell us what makes for a good life, and what is needed. I return to my vermicelli…

…but my gaze is caught by  a picture of a resolute Mia Farrow. She is under oath at The Hague and she’s saying that (Supermodel) Naomi Campbell told her that Charles Taylor had given her a huge diamond. Charles Taylor, we are reminded, allegedly smuggled and sold “blood” diamonds to finance a war of terror in Sierra Leone—another 120,000 dead. He is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In a different sort of trial, Ms. Campbell is being accused of flirting with Charles Taylor.

Eminem has put out a new video that has, we are told, set a new Youtube viewer record. It’s about domestic violence. In the video (short clip is inserted) are scenes of a couple fighting; punches are thrown, a fist goes through a wall, and everything escalates to where the woman, (Megan Fox) is set on fire—along with the house. There is a debate, we are given to understand, on whether or not this video, in it’s portrayal of an abusive relationship and domestic violence, is harmful or helpful. The producer, however, is quoted saying, "…it’s a video that had to be made."

I return to my green tea—with the hope that it is green on purpose.

George Ivan Morrison, from the wrong side of the fence, is still Van. Cool Van. Clockwork Van. Just-the-music Van.

Second song Brown Eyed Girl, last song Gloria, and the rest, folk, blues, jazz, sweet fusion.

It was 1973, perhaps 1974—those years blur—when I walked down Government Street in Victoria to a record store and bought Moondance, an album that came late to that corner of the world.

Over on Saanich Road, at "the family house," we wore the grooves clean through that vinyl.

Last night, Moondance, Into the Mystic, and a piece of These Dreams of You came clean and clear up Gallagher Hill over the fence and into the trees.

Photography by Lindy Get-your-best-side Dowhaniuk