Vancouver, BC

I've been three days in Vancouver, but I didn't want to write a thing. Today hiking on trails around Grouse Mountain, my depression lifted. A grouse boomed. I called back, he answered and so on.

Depression is caused by barometrical variances someone said. I take to the mountain trails with a vengeance.

At the Literary Storefront, in Vancouver, my poetry teacher David Bromage reads Wang Chao stories, and my homesickness left for California on the Gray Rabbit. The loft is hot as blazes, the sunset lingers forever, fiery throat of night.

Afterwards, we slipped oysters down at Leo's Seafood. There were three of us who were brave enough. Cecelia, David, and I. Margaret Atwood just shuddered. Terry, the coordinator shuddered too. David's son Christopher passes. 

Cecelia and David are newly married. Oysters are an aphrodisiac. They're hairy. It's all that bearded clam stuff, or was it hammy business. They have each other while I was invited to Terry's place to spend the night. I do need a place to crash.

So Terry runs the Vancouver readings and I run readings in Sonoma, and so we have a lot in common. However, I only met him three hours ago. God knows, maybe he's waiting for me to come onto the oysters or, or ersters as David said.

How do I know they don't have red tide here? What is that stuff sprinkled on top? Celia says it's paprika. God, she just slips them down whole, doesn't even chew them. Must have had years of practice. Maybe that's how she got more than one husband.

I remembered how Lee said she had the kind of mouth a man wants to slip a cock into. I was shocked by his candor. I couldn't keep my eyes off her mouth all night. It's always open. She has such a petite, sweet face and big boobs. She looks like she could be Christopher's kids sister and he's only seventeen and 6 foot five. David, Celia, and Chris – they all look related in a stylish fashion.

It was good to hear Lee's voice on the telephone and that Sonoma County hasn't burned down in my absence. It's wildfire season. For $2.30 a minute Lee told me in a lengthy fashion about how he quit  working on his book, and I billed this call to my home phone. Astronomical.

On the trails of Grouse Mountain I saw crooked trees growing in graceful J curves on the hillside. Ken says that when the trees move down the steep slopes, they always right themselves, growing up in a straightforward fashion—imagine trees moving like that.

Alan is now in Ketchikan, that's Pam's brother. I guess the patches on his kayak are holding. He calls Pam from a payphone. Won't be in Juneau until July 12 or so he says, and he still doesn't know I have his car. Pam tells me much later he was sweet on me. Of course I was the last to know.

Pam got a job as a waitress in Juneau. The pay's lousy. They won't let her keep the tips either. At home she'd be making much more on tips than six dollars an hour. She is completely broke. 

She supposed to be back in Sonoma by July 15 to discuss her future school plans with her husband Rick. I don't see how she does it, traveling with her lover of three years, Michael, and Rick back home making movies God knows where. Atlanta? Before he goes to Europe. 

Maybe she's talking like she actually wants to cut Rick out of her life completely. Her emotions contract and expand like a red rubber band. After three years, this is the most serious she sounded in a long time.

7/81