I’m listening with interest at a back table in a busy coffee shop in Chinatown. My former student is talking passionately about a new screenplay idea that came from a dream he had about the end of the world. This is the tail end of Reading Break and I’ve been averaging two coffee shops a day. Talking about marking free-range film essays with my TA at Moka House. The intricacies of the long poem and editing a literary magazine at Union Station. Letter of reference exchange at Paradiso and generating ideas for eco videos at The Grindstone. Two screenplay and eco related meetings at The Habit and The Spiral. Discussing the past at Mirage Café, contemplating the future at Buon Amici’s, and here now at Bean Around the World in Chinatown, talking about the world’s end. Feels to me that things are just getting started and I think of Godard’s proclamation that “everything is still to happen.” Everybody I’m meeting up with is doing something and going somewhere and there is a vibration of unlimited possibility in the damp cold air. Still, winter has arrived, and despite the constant stimuli and caffeine, a seasonal shadow of darkness is moving in. The world (of Autumn) is ending/ended.

Everybody has soul. I really don’t like that word in connection with the Experience. I like the words “feeling” and “vibration”. 

I went up to campus to play myself in a video a student is producing for my Film on the Future class. I had told the class of 150 that anyone who could build a spaceship that could fly would get an A+. My final scene in his video is watching as the Fine Arts building fires its rockets and explodes into space. I rage off and punch a tree, muttering that I’ve never had to give an A+ before. Tonight I attended a fundraiser for the local cycling scene and watched a film about Gwendal Castellan who rode his bike from Patagonia to Inuvik in the Yukon. A solid adventure and reminded me of Werner Herzog’s statement that his film school would consist of walking from LA to Tierra Del Fuego. Went to see This Is It, and was reintroduced to Michael Jackson’s immensity as a performer. You could put his best ten minutes against anybody in history. Also caught Leonard Cohen’s Live in London and so thankful to share my Canadian identity with another one of Hobo’s patron saints. Went to Fiamo, (a friend’s Tuscan restaurant) for the first year anniversary party and enjoyed a generous sampling of Italian food and Argentine Malbec. Later stopped down the street to catch a set from Kuba at Darcy’s. I’ve been listening to The Fleet Foxes and they seem to resonate everything else I listen to and like. Jules turned me on to the ‘felicien’ music video for “Roll on Arte”, by our new friends, The Felice Brothers. Patti Smith’s version of Dylan’s, “Changing of the Guard”, and Jimi’s, “Are You Experienced”, are beyond anyone’s reproach. No shortage of inspiring stuff coming in and going out. Still, amidst all this listing of encounters and events and experiences, I’m feeling a bit listless and expectant. Like there’s something riding in with the next storm…

I had very strange feelings that I was here for something and I was going to get a chance to be heard. I got the guitar together ‘cause that was all I had.

Drove seven minutes up the road to Thuja Plicata, the grove of medieval red cedars where the salmon make their valiant run in Goldstream Park. Walked through the cedars and black cottonwoods to watch the mostly Chum salmon fight their way to their deaths in the creek’s rapids. Glaucous winged gulls, a pileated woodpecker and some American Toppers circumventing the struggle and the carnage. No eagles around which seemed unusual. Took the boardwalk down through the sword fern and salmonberries to the nature house where the count showed Chum at 7800, Coho at 178 and Chinook at 23. Better than some years, worse than others. Nice to be momentarily isolated from the influx of human industry and back in nature’s pocket where primal battles are being waged. Good to see that the run is respectable and people still bring their children out to witness their epic journey. I wander back up the trail and bask in the protection of the five hundred year old cedars and dimming winter light. The skeletons and struggling bodies of the salmon are a conscious marker of perseverance and sacrifice and a quick meditative reentry into the world of the real. From coffee shops to classrooms to celluloid and coho, chum, and chinook, most everyone is still alive and working their way upstream.