A few weeks ago I went to see this friend of mine perform stand-up comedy. One of her comic cohorts was this guy (I can't remember his name, which is too bad, since I'm poaching one of his jokes) who wondered why Canadians have no superheroes of their own. He thought up two: Super Busy and Best-Effort Man--I'll leave you to imagine the rescue scenarios. Currently, I'm trapped inside the body of Monkey Mind, the hero who swoops down at the scene of a car crash, bleeding victims, the whole tragedy, only to wander off into a shoe store--OMG, the Pumas are, like, totally on sale!

And so here is my melange of recent things, which also serves as my low-blog excuse:

Sometimes you take a trip and it leaves you going, "Ehn?" Such was the trip to England. We enjoyed the weird crannies and random events more than the sites themselves. For example, one afternoon, my sister took us through the inner passages of Houses of Parliament. At the gate we got frisked, despite our visitor's badges. KT, presumed to be some sort of hood-type threat, had to remove his shoes for inspection. Inside it's troglodytic, a small musty city done in dark wood and old carpet, everything connected by long corridors, quadrangles and flights of steps. Like a Wonka factory, really--easy to get discombobbed. When you get a job there, as my sister did, I think they give you a GPS. We had salmon wellington in the subsidized cafeteria--the cheapest London meal by a landslide. In fact KT and I ate multiple entrees out of poverty consciousness, slabs of meat and slathered British things, at least one out of every steaming tray. We had pints after that and it nearly blew the buttons off our jeans. There's a pub in the lawmaking buildings. It smells fittingly like a racetrack.

Upon return from the UK I disappeared again to a meditation retreat (see "Monkey Mind" above). The experience deserves a serious blog-o-rama of its own, really. A summary of what I learned 1) It's amazing how you can grow to like or dislike strangers in total silence, based on nothing more or less than the way they walk around in sock feet. 2) I used to think this: neurosis is to creativity what tumour is to brain. 3) Dinnertime comes too late. 4) It's possible (but not preferable) to get up at 4 a.m. without coffee. 5) It's basically all in your head. 6) But you feel it everywhere else.