guess which one i am

Three's Company

(but five people crammed into a car for 28 hours in the dead of winter eating food that smells like feet and giving hand jobs to truckers for gas money is fucking awful)

aka
Montreal Return Roadtrip '06

In 1637, Renes Decartes said "I think, therefore I am."

At 10:47 pm on Tuesday, January 31, 2006, Pizza Diarist said "I can smell, therefore I need to get the hell out of this car."

Phew. Crossing three provinces in 14 straight hours, eating nothing but deep fried truck stop grub and Poppycock, and acting as a drool sponge for my napping back seat neighbours makes for a very distinctive odour indeed.

Thanks to Legs we're set up with a free downtown apartment for the three days we're in Montreal. While normally it acts as a place for bands from out of town to stay while playing the bar downstairs, a good reason to bring your own sleeping bag and towels on a trip if I've ever heard one, for three nights it was to house myself and my three female traveling mates. Hot, right? Well, not really. Stuck in a small apartment with three beautiful women and none wishing to experience the love that only a man can provide... The story of this trip, not to mention my life.

Day two I spend wads of cash like I actually have cash. And by "wads" I mean I may have trouble buying groceries for the next few months. So while my face may turn gaunt and jaundiced, I got two real nice jackets. And while the knuckles on my hand will soon be quite prominent and my skin will take on this overcooked phyllo pastry consistency, I did score two Fall cds, the first Stiff Little Fingers album and a live Jonathan Richman record.

Priorities, people. Priorities.

I could try to say something about the Low/His Name is Alive show, but my writing abilities are nowhere near where they would have to be to convey even one second of it. I'll try anyway, though: Take that feeling you get when the second line doesn't appear in the circle on a home pregnancy test and multiply that by the feeling you get when the doctor finally removes his fingers from your prostate and tells you that "everything feels fine."

It was that good.

We don't realize until we get home from the show that the dollar store clock I bought to make sure we are up at 5am doesn't work. So guess who becomes the clock? If you guessed anyone but me, then you obviously aren't familiar with how my life works. I go through all the stages of having drunk one two many beers while still conscious. I listen to my cds on broken earphones, which makes everything sound like Tom Waits. After counting cars for two hours I reach the number four. I extract as much excitement from a plastic garbage can lid that blows by as I can. I come to a lot of conclusions about my life that now strike me as the thoughts of a deleriously tired frontal lobe. At 5am I shake Library Girl and she presses the snooze alarm on my forehead and asks for 15 more minutes. And if you know anything about how my life works, you know I go back to the windowsill and give them to her.

Due to lack of sleep, day three resembles a vaselined Abba video. Word to the wise: make sure your traveling partners have something to come home to and the return trip time is cut by a third. I'm forced to defecate into my empty Poppycock bag and hold onto it for composting when we get home. When thirsty I have to open the door a crack, reach down and grab a handful of salty road slush while traveling at 180 km/hr. I don't recommend it.

We roll into Halifax extremely annoyed but with a thin layer of good humor to hide it. By now our jokes have begun to dig below the surface to actual deep seeded neurosis, so it's good it ended when it did.

Roadtrip Rule #1: Don't talk about what was talked about on the roadtrip.
Roadtrip Rule #2: Don't talk about what was talked about on the roadtrip.

I come home to 9 new phone messages, which is 9 phone messages more than normal. Four are wrong numbers. Two are the automated message from Video Difference reminding me of late film I forgot to return before I left. Two are for Library Girl who no longer lives here. But one is from the Office of the Auditor General requesting an interview with me for a summer internship in Ottawa.

Holy shit.