Difficult Music

creo ATE MY NEIGHBOURHOOD
I felt a bit forlorn this aft, so I drank a load of tea and went for a mailbox run down to creo. It was nice out, so I extended my walk down to Canada Way (looking for bus stops where I could catch a lift up to Burnaby Mountain when I start work on Tuesday) and up Willingdon back home. Lots of crows around these days, which is good because I like crows. Real Love is a crow on a telephone pole with something to say, as the song goes. Right now I’m quite taken with the way they walk. Of all the birds, crows are the best walkers. They fly down, land, then immediately start striding towards something only they can see. Other birds hop daintily about. Crows have a wide, solid Sumo stance that makes them look like they weigh about 80 pounds. I bet if they weren’t so busy with the daily grind of being a crow, they could size you up, start chasing you up the sidewalk, then take a little leap and sink that stout beak* into the tender flesh behind your knee. Then you’d know who’s boss. Crows are rad.

On the return leg up Willingdon I noticed that there’s new signage on the Dogwood Lodge, the long-term geriatric care home where Grandad lived in ’95/’96. Everything reads “creo” now. I decided to find out if the old folks were still around, so I walked up the access road to the patio by the entranceway, where the residents used to catch some rays on nice afternoons like this. There weren’t any seniors milling about, and the foyer inside was done up in creo colours. I could sense the receptionist inside glowering at me, so I casually walked away from the spot where I waved goodbye to Grandad for the last time.

*I unconsciously stole "stout beak" from David Zieroth, whose website the belter and I are working on these days.

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I'm spending the day with my guitar and a bunch of old tapes, teaching myself some riffs to take to Edmonton with me on Saturday. Going to be jamming/recording with the Dead City Radios. I'm grateful for the helpful tips I sometimes give myself when I'm recording riffs, so I can figure them out later: "Uh, this is the Scary Ann chord moved up to the fifth fret--no, wait, the third fret. Then it goes to the A power chord on, um, the seventh fret." I'd be lost otherwise. The guitar is still very much a strange and exotic instrument to me.