felis_ultharus

Travel

I just wanted to note that I'm back from BC. It was a very quiet trip -- I spent most of my days there hanging out with node357, which was nice. He composed some new music while I was there, and showed me Psychonauts, which really does deserve its reputation ^_^

I also saw a couple of friends I hadn't seen in about fifteen years -- all thanks to the miracle of Facebook. I never did get to Vancouver this time, though, so that'll have to wait for Yule.

The best pleasure though -- aside from seeing node357 -- was that of seeing the place itself. Montreal is toxic and grey and cemented compared to that greenery and clean air that is BC. I like Montreal because most of my friends are here, but except for the Old Port, and some of the older stone houses and parks, I have to admit I consider this a very ugly and polluted city. Too much concrete, and too few growing things.

Airports continue to get more and more surreal -- they've always bothered me because the waiting areas between flights are really non-places that drift detached from anything in a bland emptiness where things get sold. In other words, they're Postmodernism incarnate.

The Pearson airport in Toronto has a particularly weird waiting area. There's a stall there that sells jewellery trees for little girls, in the shapes of princesses whose heads and arms have been replaced by necklace-and-ring-holding tentacles. My first thought was Jenova from FFVII, or something out of Lovecraft.

Not much else to report -- I did not defeat any ninja armies this time around. I wanted a good start on the major edit of my novel, but only got about one-quarter in. It's almost a third finished now.

Meme

"If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal."

(I'm lucky in that this applies to probably most if not all of the people I've friended.)

So, I spent yesterday after work wandering the city in search of traces of history. Specifically, I was hunting down Griffintown.

I've had a nightmare of a time trying to get a hold of information on this vanished neighbourhood. It was an Irish slum that grew up around the Lacine Canal, but was pretty much rezoned out of existence after the war.

I went to the site of one of Canada's most infamous murders, the killing of prostitute Mary Gallagher, who was decapitated by her best friend with an axe in their little shack in Griffintown in 1879.

The shack is gone, and it's now a parking lot, but Gallagher's ghost is supposed to come back there every 7 years, looking for her head. In that dead industrial park, surrounded by rubble and empty buildings and abandoned by the world, it's easy to believe in ghosts.

Then I stumbled accidentally onto the ruins of St. Ann's church, the heart of Griffintown. Its stone foundations survive, so you can step inside and walk the aisle to where the choir and altar once were -- they're now a copse of trees, holier by far than any manmade site and yet seeming to add the ruins' beauty to its own.

Strange, the sort of eerie beauty that clung to that church that was becoming a forest, surrounded on all sides by expressway and factories. I'm always astonished at all the beauty around me, and how little it gets noticed.

In Memorium

Today is the 16th anniversary of the École Polytechnique Massacre here in Montréal. Sixteen years ago, Marc Lépine, who blamed feminists for his not getting into engineering school, charged into a classroom with a gun, and killed 14 women before turning the gun on himself.

I went to the school itself to do an unrelated story for The Link some years ago, and I was surprised to find that there was no on-site memorial of any kind. There's a memorial park some distance away, but nothing at the school itself. I found this strange in a city that'll erect a statue, build a monument, or put up a plaque for any event, happy or sad.

It seemed strange that the site of the massacre wasn't marked in any way, in a city so devoted to memory.

EDIT: montrealais has informed me that a plaque does exist. He's seen it. I was surprised. I looked all over the school the two days I was covering a conference.

Life

I wrote about two-thirds of my notes for my novel, and penned a poem yesterday. Where does one send a poem to be published these days?

I'm also 6 pages into the 14-18 page essay due on Thursday. I think I'm going to have to miss the Jack Layton rally tonight.