NOTICE

NOTICE TO ALL WRITERS AND FILMMAKERS

The Society for the Preservation of Story have declared a ten-year moratorium on stories about VAMPIRES, ZOMBIES, and TIME TRAVEL, effective immediately.

No stories, poems, books, videos, games, webisodes, or movies (animated or live action) featuring vampires, zombies or time travel will be permitted for a period of ten years from this date. Anyone caught creating or disseminating such material will be banned from all human communication for the entire ten years. Anyone consuming these stories or chattering inanely about them online will be advised to have their head examined.

In making this harsh but necessary decree, the Society points to the accelerating destruction of Story ecosystems everywhere by these profit-driven monocultures of endlessly recycled tropes, stale plot devices and just plain bad writing.

Citing the prevalence of these cliched stories part of the worldwide phenomenon of “global dumbing,” the Society warns that if such drastic recovery steps are not taken, the life-giving richness and diversity of Story will wither and die, as will our collective imagination and creativity. The Society makes no predictions about what life might be like after such a catastrophe, since this would be to indulge in another over-used scenario, the post-apocalyptic tale.

hotel stay

Hotel hallway. Mirrors at the end of each corridor. Their bevelled edges catch the light from the chandelier-style light fixtures overheard, creating rainbow prisms as I walk to my room door. Maybe mirror should be spelled mirrorrim.

Hotel hallway at night. Silent, muffled stretch of road. Strangers housed on either side. Nothing is going to happen here.

Keycard in the door. Always a tiny little thrill to see that green light go on. It's going to open for me!

Sitting on the edge of the bed. Too early to go to sleep, but nothing else to do. I could read, but I don't want to. Tired of words. Usually at home I look forward to solitude, but not when it's enforced on me like this, by reason of being alone in a strange place. Cut off.

Muffled clunks and bumps from below, and the ceaseless susurrus of the heating system, which is, listening for a while, actually composed of two distinct sounds: a pure airstreamy flow, and a lower, more rattley undersound with punctuation, like a muttering voice.

What are those clunks and bumps from below? Enthusiastic lovers? No. Too mechanical a sound, too regular (but with a chuckle I'm reminded of the couple I heard in the room next to mine one night in another hotel, the gushing repetition of each other's names "Oh, ---! Oh, ---!")

I go the bathroom to brush my teeth. Flick on the buzzing fluorescent. Not my bathroom. Anyone's bathroom.

Cut off here from my world. Hotel room as transit state. Not a house, not an apartment, because really all it is is a bedroom. Anyone's bedroom. The only thing that changes is the one sleeping in the bed.

In bed. Reaching to turn off the light. Remembering waking up in a hotel room in Beijing not knowing where I was. During sleep had completely forgotten I was thousands of miles from home. Woke up in pitch dark. Where the hell am I? Which in a terrifying way was really "who am I?"

Click. Bedside light off. Lying on back facing up, beneath starchy sheets that don't seem to know me, or like me very much. The clunks and bumps still rising from below.

I think this will be a long night.

Chateau Lake Louise

Sonny, Director of Pet Relations
(if you're apprehensive about hiking around the lake by yourself, you can take Sonny with you)

cathedrals, contemporary and cretaceous

find the wolf

hard to take a bad picture at Louise, despite my best efforts

more of Banff

sunrise: a better view this morning

beneath the caves of ice: Whyte Museum

tourists: a quiet moment

tourists: a quiet moment

Merry Kitschmas

Banff

Banff valley "view" from my hotel room

Banff Springs Hotel dining scene, 1920's

Timberwolf, Buffalo Nation museum