THEN I SAID

Marina Beach Motel
Today we’ve seen the winter come
and it seems strange
to me as well

Tomorrow our hearts
will breathe with ease
Tomorrow our hearts

It’s a fragile business
making happy people
reading about safety
hearing about safety
out of words and gestures
some planes are delayed
their crew sent somewhere else
the luggage lies
in the dark
learning about
the little mistakes
hearing them or seing them
you seem frozen in unfamiliar thoughts

Hamburg Airport. A woman, slightly red hair, is emptying the trashcans before she puts on some yellow latex gloves and picks up two paper-cups of coffee. The girl next to is Russian, she talks on the cell-phone. Long distance? This little kid is sapping some revolving doors of their playfulness and his mother’s patience. The floor is shiny smooth and someone standing in the distance is reflected full length, floating, levitating, lighter. The kid has forcefully been removed from the revolution he so enjoyed. His mother carrying him head down, shirt and hands dragging along the shiny floor. His navel looks funny.

He said I should drive. “OK” I said, “but I don’t like your clutch". “What do you mean
you don’t like my clutch?” “Well it’s just no good, it’s all burned up and makes me nervous
at lights". “whatever, just drive, I’ll tell you where to go".

Off we went, him and I. I didn’t know what he was thinking, if he was thinking at all. But
who cared at this point. Who damn cared about thinking anymore.

I revved the car onto the freeway and it obeyed, took the road in its stride, you might say.
Past some old trees and some old houses, old as hell. I started feeling better. The sight of
old houses doesn’t matter much when you’re driving.

“So what do you think?” “Are we gonna be alright?” “I don’t know “, I said.
“Turn on the radio, will you?”

In his essay “The German Reporter", Douglas Coupland sites the following lines from Truman Capote:

As for me
I could leave the world
with today
in my eyes

Coupland says he wrote these lines on an old t-shirt he used to wear and gave it to the German reporter, hoping the lines would seep into his bloodstream, and then into the heart of the ghost of his own former self .

I put the book down, holding it sort of weakly, lying on my bed in the house I grew up in. I was staring vacantly into the air, dust particles arrested in the autumn sun. I don’t know, I seemed like a ghost to myself, but I knew how he felt, and it made me want to go to Vancouver.

What’s with sitting in Germany and thinking about Stinson Beach?
Thinking about the shark-attack that occured in 5 feet of water, at dawn. There’s a little motel just up from the beach: Sandspit. It has a fake fire and nice chairs. I walked to the beach barefoot. Got dirty. The local shop sells Bushmills in three different sizes. Handy.

If you want to, you can drive there from Monterey. Monterey, where you can lie in the pool at the The Monterey Bay Lodge, at night. It’s blue at night, the water, lit from underneath. And above, the Magnolia trees filter the moonlight, and the sound of jets landing.

Today we celebrate the release of The Donnas’ new album Gold Medal.

When I see The Donnas I wish I could stay in my mid- to late twenties forever.
To feel that everything’s ahead of me; that I don’t have to age and get old, but stay
here and now, and wait and see.

Maybe tomorrow something good, and cool, and shifty will come along?
It’s important to be cool, good, and shifty I think.

Last night at the table
holding my knife
I saw the roast do the rounds
and the neigbours were drinking Tecate
enjoying accordion harmonies
peppered with soliloquies of laughter
This late afternoon
the month of June
I passed my feet over cold tiles
tugging my napkin of rough cotton
asking myself: would you be my wife
forever in the here and after?

September, on my way from LA to Trondheim, rediscovering the beauty of the mix-CD:
My friend Daniel gave me a CD the night before, while I was taking leave of the city at
the Short Stop.

Sitting in a coffee bar at LAX, I put the CD into my discman, fixated on a little piece of
ripped paper with bandnames and songtitles on it:

Travelling Music For Changing Times

The Finn Brothers- Won’t Give In
DJ Honda f/Mos Def- Travellin’ Man
The Mull Historical Society- The Final Arrears
Elton John- Goodbye yellow Brick Road
Lyle Lovett- In My Own Mind
The Jayhawks- Blue
The Tragically Hip- Ahead By A Century
Stars- Elevator Love Letter
The Psychedelic Furs- Love My Way
Primitive Radio Gods- Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth
Jamiroquai- Sunny
Inner City- Good Life(Buena Vida ‘99 Mix)
Coldcut- Autumn Leaves
The Isley Brothers- Highways Of My Life
John Martyn- May You never
Ocean Colour scene- Outside Of A Circle
My Morning Jacket- The Way That He Sings
Stereophonics & The Jools Holland Orchestra- Handbags and Gladrags

It was gloomy for an LA morning, but I needed my sunglasses.
I watched the planes through a large window, coming and going.
I guess I was alright, going, knowing I could always come back.

We climbed Paul Revere’s narrow stair
and laughed at the attendant’s flippant hum
of affirmation, on a charred December day.
I’d have looked, I think, saddened
at the lines under your deep slumberous eyes
thinking first of a warehouse, then an oak tree
then a line from Hazlitt
about Cobbett butting at all obstacles
as unicorns are attracted to oak trees.
A few months earlier, a gammy afternoon uptown
unable to connect that pilfered courtyard
and vast tapestries, with not wanting
to wrestle, as you loved, on bedroom floors

This poem is written by Craig Beaumont

then I said: what will tomorrow bring?
And they told me it would look like nothing I could ever imagine,
that I could only do what I was already doing.
And by doing it, I would invent the future.