Around the corner from my downtown Montreal hotel, a busy urban cafe spread over two floors, where I order up some freshly-prepared puns on French toast … which is all somewhat uneggspected.
It is way way too early in the morning for a menu fully loaded with French quips and double entendres. Taxi!
Leaving the overcrowded city, speeding to the international airport on the suburban outskirts, weaving in and out of mid-morning traffic along the freeway.
My driver tells me he wants be in a film.
I want to tell him I don’t want to be in a mortuary, certainly not anytime soon, but I hold silent on that.
Instead I give him the bad news – all those taxi movies have already been made, and they all got panned. Plus, none of the cars were twenty-year-old imports, falling apart.
I exit breathless, through the barely-functioning passenger door, leaving my driver a good tip – stop at red lights, if you can.
Bumbling into the terminal building, I do my best to retain a sunny outlook, while remaining upright … and hopeful that I don’t see my breakfast again today.
Luckily, in the departure lounge, a cold midday beer is waiting for me, served at the counter with a free snarl and a large chip from off the barkeep’s shoulder.
Someone got out of bed on the wrong side today!
For me, things have never been so swell, even if I do feel a tad unwell after my ride here, is what I want to tell my grouchy bartender … but he’ll only end up dragging me down, is what I figure, so I keep schtum and drink up.
I think I’m going to an island, but I’m not. Turns out I’m already on one, which no-one told me.
I walk onto a plane, which shortly afterwards takes off, and not long later lands in Nova Scotia. This is all very fortuitous, since this is where I wanted to go.
In the arrivals terminal, I show someone a piece of paper, and in return get given the keys to a rental car, a brand new Jetta.
Sometimes it’s just so frickin’ easy.
Shades on, cruising down the highway, to my love shack getaway.
Yet somehow I end up in a semi-derelict house with creaky floorboards and full-on grandma decor.
I’m met there by my host, and – not for the first time today – I feel like I’m being taken for a ride … I’ve paid to be here on a credit card, yet why do I feel like I’m a squatter, in half a house recently abandoned by it’s elderly resident, now departed.
The other half of the house is fully abandoned – and falling over gradually.
This is all so wrong it’s almost right. But not quite.
Of course, I smile at my host and nod along gratefully and say hollow things like “This is great!” when what I’m actually thinking is “What circumstances and choices have brought me here to this exact place, here today?”.
And, “What’s that smell?”
And, “Will I leave here fully conscious, under my own volition?”
Once my host has departed, I settle in to my burrow, located directly opposite a members-only yacht club.
I spend the evening hibernating in my hovel, watching ‘Taxi 4’, eating a pre-prepared supermarket salad and sipping tap water from a plastic beaker.
How times change.
Back to being an anonymous solo sightseer – no longer in vogue, a day on pause, dodging early graves.
An Outside World 