Woodstock 3/3

"I have been around the world

and I have seen your love"

-Red Hot Chili Peppers

There’s a sign on that post that immediately makes me think about infinite imagination.  It makes me think of sex, which is, you know, everything.  I mean, not EVERYthing, but seriously, scientifically, everything.  I exist because my parents had sex, and they exist because their parents had sex, and everyone ever has existed because people had sex with each other.

The country represented on this sign is one of the leading producers of human imagination.  It instantly stirs up memories of sex, drugs and rock and roll.  It reminds me of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  In represents a gateway to a whole new world.  You know which one I’m talking about: the sign that points to Canada.

As I look at this sign I realize that yesterday I showed a video of a Canadian team winning the World Series.  I wasn't doing it because of Canada specifically, but since we're on the subject, why not?  Besides, the sign I was talking about doesn’t really say “Van”.  It says Vancouver, which is in Canada.  I have never been to western Canada, but I have been to eastern Canada on plenty of adventures, and met plenty of people from western Canada and Vancouver during my adventures around the world.

Canada is America’s neighbor to the north.  It is very well-behaved and doesn’t cause much trouble for anyone else.  While the United States went independent early and went crazy with the pressure to accumulate, conquer and influence its own world, Canada was enjoying its vast beauty in the summer and too busy simply trying to survive the winter to bother with conquering anyone else.  On top of that, they remained under control of the British flag for quite some time after the United States, and waited around for their independence until Britain realized it really was a pain maintaining such a large world empire.  I don't care how it happened, because it worked.  They created basketball and ice hockey, my two favorite sports to play in the world.  I know I just went on about the beauty of baseball and the poetry of football, and I honestly did learn about those sports first and care passionately about them first.  But b-ball and hockey soon supplanted them as favorites once I grew up and got more experience with both.  But I didn't play basketball in Canada.  That's too loose of a connection to start out with.

I have many experiences of Canada, so I guess it’s easiest to start with the truth: Canada was my first abroad experience.  It’s the first foreign country I ever visited, out of many at this point.  I don’t even remember what age I was or how it went the first time.  I have many cousins who I love, but two of them are named Mike and Dan, and they always have had and will always have a special place in my life because they are a year older and a year younger, respectively.  Growing up they were like distant brothers, and when I got to see them, usually once or twice a year, it was the biggest event in the world for me.  They originally started out in western New York with their mom (my dad’s sister), their father and their younger sister.  But they moved up to Montreal when I was very young, and stayed there until we became teenagers and they moved to England, which would become the second foreign country I visited, for the same reasons I visited the first one.  I had my first ever camp out experience in the fields of my parents' new farm upstate with them when we were eleven and they still lived in Canada and were close enough to visit for about a year of overlap.


Mike and Dan weren't just my friends, they were the gatekeepers to my bliss: they had Nintendo, and Super Nintendo, and all of the best games, so I was well-versed in Super Mario Bros. and Kirby’s Dream Land by the completion of every visit.  I wasn’t allowed to have my own Nintendo back then, and pretty much all I wanted in the world as a young boy was to play Nintendo because I saw it all the time at the babysitter’s house and was given just enough of a taste each day by her kids to put me in a frenzy when I got home and had to use my own imagination.   Looking back I’m glad my parents enforced that rule, because my imagination is one of my greatest treasures (regardless of writing), but Nintendo had a way of feeding my imagination too.  There’s something about imagining something in your head, and there’s something about interacting with other human’s imaginations which are being shared on a screen.  Balance is the key.  Besides, video games were always best when we played together.

Once I stayed with them for two weeks on my own, without the rest of my family.  It was the summer I turned 8 years old.  My favorite memory is Mike peacefully giving his peanut butter sandwich to some birds outside, the babysitter Trevor yelling at him and saying he couldn’t play Kirby’s Dream Land anymore, Mike getting angry and kidnapping the Kirby cartridge to rebel against this great injustice and at least prevent his younger brother/nemesis Dan from playing, and Dan angrily pounding on the car demanding Kirby back while Trevor concocted an elaborate tale about Mike “holding Kirby hostage” to tell the parents.  Never underestimate Nintendo Power.  Mike and Dan moved away to England once we became teenagers, so I didn’t have any real reason to go up to Montreal anymore.

As I flip through my passport, I find the only stamp I have from Canada.  It’s from 2008 and says “Woodstock”.  That’s the name of a song by Joni Mitchell, who’s from Canada.  I know that because my sister listened to Joni Mitchell a lot growing up, and I heard it through our shared wall.  She also listened to a lot of The Band and Neil Young, much to my chagrin as a modern alternative rock listener in his mid-teens.  Right now I would say that Joni Mitchell is one of the most beautiful and inspiring people in the world, but back then I just wanted to listen to guy music from my own generation.  Speaking of which, I remember my next visit to Canada and Montreal. 

I was fifteen years old, in my sophomore year of high school in a small town in upstate New York.   The summer before that school year started was a monumental event in my personal perception of pop culture: Woodstock ’99.  My friend Robert, the musician, had taped the whole thing on Pay-Per-View and let me borrow it right after it happened.  I was so psyched because it had all of these bands I loved at the time, angry hard rocking bands that expressed my teenage distress with grungy finesse.  Bands like The Offspring, Metallica and Rage Against the Machine. 

There was a less angry band that was more popular than all the others, and they were chosen to close out the festival: Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I only had a few of their songs, but I was hooked after they flew their freak flags high.  The best picture I can paint of the whole show is the entrance: the blue-haired bassist Flea comes running out buck naked and jumping up and down before someone hands him his guitar and he breaks into a badass bass riff, and then the mysterious skinny artistic John Frusciante comes out fully sleeved with long brown hair and a beard and starts shredding on guitar like the genius master of my generation that he is, and then Chad Smith grins constantly as he keeps the beat with his muscle shirt and backwards baseball cap, and finally lead man Anthony Kiedis comes bouncing out screaming his head off with bleached hair wearing a button-down dress shirt and tie complemented by black shorts and many visible tattoos which will fully reveal themselves when he rips his shirt off in about two minutes.  The camera flashes to a woman in the crowd holding a sign that says, "Anthony: If You Show Me Yours I'll Show You Mine", and then another topless woman crying and smiling.  They open with “Around the World”, a hit single from their new platinum-selling album Californication, marking their return to glory after eight years apart.  They had rocked the world with Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and then guitar genius Frusciante succumbed to many addictions and quit the band.  They had another great album with Dave Navarro in 1995, but 1999’s Californication won over just about my entire generation.  Later in the show they say that if anyone has a baby during the show, the drummer will put it through college.  Flea makes a weird speech about loving Ziggy comics and Iggy Pop and taking a big bowel movement in the morning and really loves Iggy Pop and he loves all of us too.  Then they start rocking again and Kiedis screams out, "You were made far away in a sea, just like me... take a look at the stars in your head, fields of space kid!  I'm a sidewinder, I'm a California King!  I swear it's everywhere!  It's everything!".  Kiedis then tells the women who are menstruating to please throw their tampons on the stage.  It's just a minor thing and I'm a minor king.  You've got to trust that all the fuss is just a minor thing, y'all.  He knows everything.  I don't know much about any of that yet, so I'm not sure if he's trying to be outrageous toward the girls or the guys or himself.  Then he starts dancing around to the funkiest porn-like Don Juan braggadocio rap ever, "Sir Psycho Sexy".  Man they look like they're having a blast.  Some white boy on lots of drugs sneaks onto the stage and starts dancing like a freak before jumping back into the crowd.  People are lighting bonfires on the fringe of the crowd.  "Where I go I just don't know, I've go to take it slow..." some annoying corporate guy comes out and pretends to be cool and asks everyone to move away from the fires so the fire trucks can come. They finally let the band back out to finish.  "When I find my peace of mind, I'm gonna give you some of my good times..."  Their encore is "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix.

To me the Chili Peppers represented the ultimate male teenage fantasy: making wild and funky rock songs while looking awesome, and being completely freaky, weird, sexy and rebellious while doing so.  They were insane and offensive, and they were completely proud of that, and they could afford to be because they were rich and respected by enough people to feel good about themselves.  Anthony rapped and openly bragged about his sexual lusts and loves more than I’d ever heard anyone do.  Then again, hip-hop was still a few years away on my timeline.  Then there was Flea’s obvious extended comfort zone at having his penis flapping in the wind before all of his fans.  I could relate to that.  When I was five years old my mom was taking a video of us playing by this lake.  We had just gone swimming, and had towels on, but were naked underneath.  My mom asked me what I wanted the video to be about, and I excitedly opened my towel like a superhero and said, "EVERYTHING!" forgetting I was naked and on camera.  I wasn't even embarrassed.  After all, it was only my body, and everybody had one, and I was having a good time.  Ask Michael Balzary.  He knows what's up.

I think my favorite part was during the song "Under the Bridge" when they all came close as a team while Anthony sang, "Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner, sometimes I feel like my only friend, is the city I live in, the city of Angels, lonely as I am, together we cry".  It was so apparent that each one had a totally different style and artistic image, yet together they created songs that were beautiful, funky and fun for everyone.  I know a lot of hipsters who can't stand them, but I still find that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are probably the most universally appreciated band of my generation.  I'm not saying that they're the best or even my favorites, but they're the most likely to generate an, "Oh yeah, they're great," from any ears that came of age in the past twenty years.  "It's hard to believe that there's nobody out there, it's hard to believe, that I'm all alone..."

After the show a lot of the fans rioted and trashed everything.  Many later claimed that it was a rebellion against the corporate sell-out of the Woodstock idea.  After all, it was $8 for a bottle of water.  Then again, hundreds of women were raped.  I'm really glad that I was too young to go, as cool as the idea sounded at first.  I got to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers live two other times, one of them a festival, and it was a much more loving affair in the true sense of the words.  But that was not only horrible in and of itself, but it made my generation look really bad in front of all of those snarky baby-boomers who claimed that they knew how to throw a real party.  I think it made the baby boomers look worse.  After all, they put the whole thing together and profited from all the violence and rape.  Now that I’m older, I prefer the idea of Woodstock '69 to '99, but back then I was living my own time, and that was the festival when I was needing to identify with something larger than myself.  What better than music?  A festival of music!  I still love the music from RHCP.  It's energetic, enthusiastic, sexy, fun, and at times, it shines with poetic brilliance.

Shortly after Woodstock ’99 we got a German exchange student named Linda.  My sister had become obsessed with everything international after all of her surgeries in Baltimore, and had befriended many exchange students at our school.  Like the Japanese student Toshiko, who loved visiting our family so much that she came back with her friend Kazumi the next summer.  They made the mistake of wanting to watch the beginning of Woodstock '99 with me, and ran out of the room in fear when Korn came on stage and the lead singer started rolling around on the ground crying and growling with bagpipes and a kilt.  While I was mesmerized by just how loud and dark and crazy all of these rock stars were, my sister was trying to find a culture she could understand a little better than this one, and eventually convinced us to take in our own exchange student for a whole year as a family.  We chose this girl from eastern Germany, and she arrived at our house in August. 

I remember having mixed feelings about taking in someone from Germany.  As a child I had been obsessed by Germany because they were the main villains in both World Wars, and especially the big one, World War II.  Indiana Jones was always fighting them and saving the world from them.  I’d read a lot of history books about the wars when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by the Germans.  I'm 1/8^th German, so that might have had something to do with it.  Then again, the most evil man in the world came from Germany, a man named Adolf Hitler.  He tried to take over the world and kill not just the Jews, but anyone who was different and made him feel inferior.  He wanted everything to be his way.  There had to be strict order and purity for the human race to be saved.  Well, luckily, Linda was nothing like him, and neither is any other German I’ve met in my life.  There are many.  Germans love traveling, so I meet them and they meet me.  Also, my sister loves a certain German, which has led to many more Germans.

Linda instantly became a super popular hit at my small school in the middle of nowhere, because she was very outgoing, daring, intelligent, athletic and energetic.  She won over my family instantly, which is saying a lot for me because I was fifteen and very sarcastic.  Even worse, all the guys teased me about living with the one girl that every guy in my grade had a crush on, even though she was two years older.  It was kind of weird having a new girl living in my house just as I was hitting puberty full throttle, and having to see her as my sister.  But that’s what I did and have done since, and she’s still a member of the family.  She was actually my first big inspiration to travel, even before my sister (who traveled abroad the first time right after Linda left), because she had been brave enough to leave her home across the ocean, depriving herself of her family, friends and familiar language, and live with total strangers in a new culture while still studying as a serious student.  She had a lot of speed and endurance, as evident in her cross-country track championships.  Since her stay with us she’s explored much of South America and Europe.

Halfway through the year we went up to Montreal to show Linda around.  I don’t remember too much about the trip other than it was cold and we went into a record store.  That’s when I finally bought my own copy of Californication after listening to my neighbor’s scratched version for months on end.  I think I warmed up immediately after looking at that cover with the fiery pool reflecting the sky.  After we left the record store we had to go to the subway to get back to our car, and I remember seeing a magazine stand that caught my eye.  I was fifteen years old and I saw a Red... Hot... Playboy. 

But not just any Playboy.  I won’t get too specific, but when I was 9 years old I subscribed to Sport magazine because I liked sports, and one day the swimsuit edition came.  Probably the most awkward moment of my life to date at that time, considering my mom was the one who handed it to me from the mail pile, simply saying, "Your new... swimsuit edition is here."  I was in some kind of confused awe, but even as a nine year old I knew outward beauty when I saw it.  One of them in particular caught my eye.  It only showed her first name.  The weirdest thing was I already had this crush on a really cute girl two years earlier, and this model had the same name, but was obviously a real woman.  Or was she?  She's a page, after all, and she was looking at me, but she was looking at everyone.  It was both comforting and lonely, and confusing.  I was nine.  Why should I be in such private awe of such perfection... why shouldn't I?  I didn’t know anything else about her other than her body, but here she was six years later on the cover of Playboy in a train station in Canada.  Apparently she was showing more of her body than ever with anyone who was willing to pay the intermediary financial channels, because she'd already been paid.  I would later learn that she was a b-celebrity in Hollywood who would turn her modeling career into a TV hosting career.  I was happy that she wasn't lazy.  She may have used her appearance to attract money, but she took her job seriously and she enjoyed it and believed that it would be better for the world.  Beauty is beauty, so why not?  That's what I reasoned back then, anyway, and I was fifteen, so I was good at believing all of my own logic.  In the three minutes I had to think about it, I tried to silently devise a million different unique strategies complete with ninjas and smoke bombs, or at least get a closer look at it (I was too young to buy it anyway), but I couldn’t figure out anything that could work in such a situation.  

After all, I was there with two strong intelligent women, and I would never be able to explain such hedonistic low brow appetites to them.  When I was six my mother had once sat me down for a talk after she saw me getting addicted to Super Mario Land on my Game Boy because she wanted to make sure that I understood women weren't merely helpless beautiful princesses who needed to be rescued; that many of them were perfectly capable of fighting for themselves.  Apparently she'd never played Super Mario Bros. 2 where you can play as the princess, and she's actually the best character because she can leap farther than anyone.  It's almost as if she can fly.  All of that being said, I couldn't let my mother catch me ogling a woman who made millions of dollars by showing off her silicone breasts and perfectly toned unclothed posterior, not to mention the holiest hole where all life begins.  Then again, I'd already been show this super-soft scientific explanatory cartoon video (no, not a porno) explaining reproduction when I was seven, because my family's like that and I didn't have much of a choice, or if I did, I don't remember caring.  There's a big difference between seven and fifteen, and there's a big difference between a cartoon instructional video and a beautiful naked woman. 

I remember an all too familiar feeling stirring up inside of me, the feeling that makes every human go crazy, in their own way.  It's the world saying: I WANT TO BE MORE THROUGH YOU!  It's the same feeling that makes the Peppers get up on stage and light up every libido in the audience.  A man can't help it: he perceives some sexy stimulus and it's all over for him.  If he's older and more experienced he'll have some practice filtering what's worthy of his awe and taking care of business when necessary, but if he's fifteen he's screwed.  We didn’t have a strong internet connection back then, and only one family computer anyway, so investigating online wasn't an option.  There was nothing I could do about it except put on my headphones and pretend I had a wild, sexy, and virile style like the Chili Peppers.  Moving fast in a car helped.  Never mind that Anthony grew up with a drug dealing father in LA and lost his virginity at eleven, whereas I came from a stable family and lost my virginity... let's just say way later.  Not at fifteen.  Of course, they sang about more than just sex.  He also sang about the poisonous effect that the spread of California culture was having on the rest of the world, and the remedy of going on wonderful wandering road trips where you "go get lost" with your friends.  I pondered all of these "dreams of californication" as I watched the frozen north country fly by through a window in the Quest.

I mentioned before that Canada invented my favorite sport, basketball.  I had my best game a few weeks after that visit to Canada.  It was the last JV game of the season, and I scored 12 points off the bench against the best team in the league.  The whole time I had this song from Californication in my head.  It wasn't one of the crazy wild energetic ones about passionate sex.  It was the mellowest song on the album, "Porcelain".  I'm not saying that to sound sensitive, because even as it was going through my head it wasn't one of my favorite songs on the album.  I usually skipped it in fact.  But I couldn't get it out of my head for some reason, and it calmed me down and let me focus on swishing three-pointers.  I might have had "Easily" and "Scar Tissue" in my head too.

I don't know if it was in my head while I played basketball, but my favorite song on that album was and still is the last one, "Road Trippin".  Sometimes I think Anthony Kiedis isn't as good as the band he's leading, and I feel bad because he's incredibly talented and even brilliant at times, but the band is just that good.  Robert Plant had the same problem with Led Zeppelin.  I can't criticize though, since I'm only good for words in that respect, and I'm not brave or skilled enough to sing or rap them in front of a crowd, and he does both.  Plus he used to jump off of five story buildings into swimming pools when he was fifteen years old.  But whenever I hear that Californication finale, I'm completely blown away.  They get it RIGHT.

Speaking of which, the next time I went to Canada I was 23 years old.  I was helping my friend Sarah move to Prince Edward Island to uphold my end of a misleading contract supposedly forged when she helped me unload my moving van the year before when I had come from Brooklyn to Queens.  My friends Dana and Mike had already helped me empty my apartment in Bushwick, and she met me in Astoria, twenty minutes from where she lived.  Somehow this meant it was only fair that I help her move fifteen hours away.  I was a little worried at first because I was scrambling for jobs at the time, but then I said screw it and realized that it was actually an awesome opportunity to get out of the city and go on my first road trip that year.  Plus I hadn't been out of the country in over two years.  It was spring, and maybe my friend Jack would want to tag along for the adventure.  Prince Edward Island is really far up in northeastern Canada, and I think it was about 15 hours total of driving from New York City.  I’d met Sarah through a friend named Elisa in New York, and I’d met her through Facebook because we both loved this artist named Jason Webley.  Because of that, I ended up being friends with a bunch of a new people.  Sarah and Elisa were both writers, which was very helpful at a time in my life when I knew I was an artist but wasn't really sure about how to go about that at all.  They'd just graduated from the Tisch School of Writing at NYU, so they knew something about writing.  And they were both really smart, funny, motivated and weird.  Elisa connected me to Tom Robbins and a zillion good people, and Tom Robbins is still my favorite writer to this day.  Sarah woke me up to the tenacity and dedication necessary to pursue one's dreams through her own example.  They were both a lot of fun and showed me you could enjoy New York City, since I was still essentially a rookie finishing his first year when we met.  A year later I took a road trip with two of my favorite allies, Jack and Sarah, and that moving truck was definitely fully loaded with snacks and supplies.  We weren't allowed to get lost though, even though I really wanted to detour to Acadia National Park because it was a beautiful national park and it was on the way and I hadn't been to one in forever, but I was overruled by the reasonable people, and it wasn't my stuff in the back of the truck.  We entered Canada at the Woodstock checkpoint, and then proceeded north for several more hours.  Jack and I remember being a little depressed on behalf of Sarah because it seemed so cold and uninviting once we got there.  We were proud of Sarah for being so brave and leaving everything behind to live on a foreign island on such short notice (she had been transferred from her video game writing company in New York), but we were both in agreement that we were happy that we didn’t have to stay there.  If only we had, we might have had some of the same love luck Sarah enjoyed.  She met her future husband our first morning after arriving.

After we made sure she'd survive, Jack and I took a fifteen hour overnight train through Canada to Montreal, the first foreign city I’d visited.  Jack and I have a special connection.  He’s one of those people about which a lot of people feel honored to say the exact same thing.  Even so, he and I are both from Long Island, originally, and both found that we are country boys in large swaths of our souls.  We met at college the first day because we lived in the same hallway, and he burst out of nowhere and gave me a hug unexpectedly during my lowest loneliest moment as a freshman, and we didn't even really hang out back then.  When I decided to travel to New Zealand, I found out that he was going to Australia.  When I studied in New Zealand, he hinted that he might show up at my door during his spring break, and three weeks later he rang my doorbell.  We traveled to Bonnaroo 2007 and back together, and I could write a whole novel just about that weekend, and I probably will someday.  He taught English in China during my first year in New York, and we always seem to meet up when I need someone to help me sort out the spiritual uncertainty.  We rode the train back across the border together and hung out for a few days before he went on to his next adventure.  He had plenty ahead of him.

Later that summer I saw Linda again.  She was visiting with her new boyfriend from Germany, and we hung out in New York City.  My friend hooked us up with tickets to see Mayor Bloomberg speak at a small event, and he made some reference to a casual affair in Europe when he was younger, and everyone laughed because it involved skiing.  For some reason there was some sort of parade queen there, probably because the event was celebrating some specific type of cultural heritage which eludes me now.  Linda wanted to play the role of cool big sister and introduced me to the queen, wearing her sash and everything.  I thought she was a little attractive, but I didn't understand the whole sash deal.  I asked her about it and she seemed as confused as me, saying that someone just told her to be the queen, and after two more basic questions I decided there was nothing more to say and went back to hang out with everyone.  Linda lectured me that I can't always expect deep philosophical connections with women, and that sometimes I just have to go play.

And I did.  I started dating more and being less uptight, and I had more fun.  Not Anthony Kiedis level fun, but more fun than I had been having.  But I also knew that the fun wasn't that fulfilling when it didn't lead anywhere else.  It wasn't the fun's fault.  It just wasn't enough.  It's then that I finally started believing interviews I'd read with Mr. Kiedis where he didn't actually appear to be the happiest man on earth.  He didn't appear to regret his "conquests", but he was clearly searching for something deeper, and much earlier than I'd realized.  As early as the Californication album he was a one-woman man, or at least going from one serious long-term monogamous relationship to another.  He was also on a lot of drugs I hope I never try (and I've tried some lovely drugs, I must say), so that's another variable thrown into the mix.

Songs like "Around the World" inspired me more to actually travel around the world than try to sleep with as many women as possible.  I was lucky enough to visit China and teach English in Japan.  I also got in a motorcycle accident in Vietnam, just like Jack, except his was worse and scarier and miraculous.  Jack’s a trailblazer, that’s for sure.  All of these memories of spiritual friends and foreign countries brings me back to Canada.

When I was in Thailand in 2010, I met this amazing world traveler named Mark in this beach paradise area that was for budget travelers.  I was on my way to Cambodia, and he’d just come back.  He had a few years on me, but we synched completely, and he was full of encouragement at a very crucial time in my life.  He'd started traveling off and on when he was my age.  Now he was in his early 30s but still enjoying exploring the globe while finding respectable ways to support himself.  I had initially thought I was going to just see India and Thailand on that trip, but he encouraged me to trust my intuition and continue on, and it turned into an adventure beyond anything I could have imagined.  He’s from somewhere in western Canada, although originally South African now that I think of it.  Close enough.  I remember him even telling me that he'd abstained from sex for an entire year after being in serious relationships simply so he could clear his head.  I hadn't shared a bed with a woman for nearly a year at that point, so he made me feel less crazy.

Then there were the two Canadian women, Laura and Kristina, who were both seasoned solo travelers and had explored enormous portions of the earth on their own, but recently met up and started traveling together.  That happens on the road a lot.  I was on my way to the uncertainty of a new city when they sat down next to me at the Peace Cafe and told me about couchsurfing.org and this diving shop in the town I was going to where I could stay for free with this French-Canadian guy who had extra rooms.  That's exactly what I did, and couchsurfing has been an excellent experience ever since.

Then there’s Andy Hall, from Vancouver, who I met in a jazz bar in Hanoi.  I was out on the town with this adventurous French girl on vacation from her life in Australia, and her younger brother who hated traveling.  I struck up a conversation with a friendly Canadian at the next table, which wasn’t a surprise because Canadians are very friendly people.  It must be all the clear stars in the sky that makes them so peaceful and approachable.  There's a line from the Canadian movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World where the evil hipster obsessed with being cool makes fun of the hero's "tragically Canadian sensibilities".  Well, this real life Scott Pilgrim knew what's up.  First, he told me that I could figure out a way to kayak in Halong Bay on my own without joining a tour, and that if I wanted to do things my way versus the group way, I would find a way.  That led to one of the top ten experiences of my life.  Second, he was not only aware of Japanese piano sensation Hiromi Uehara, but agreed that she is the undisputed musical genius of our generation.  He's a professional piano player, which is more credentials than I have, being a mere possessor of ears and a heart, so take his word for it.  Plus I ran into him again two more times while traveling in Vietnam.

Speaking of Japan and Hiromi, I’m once again recalling Vancouver, where my friend and former co-worker Shiori now lives so she can improve her English.  Every Tuesday in Japan I would report to work and get in a car with her to ride an hour to a kindergarten to teach little kids, and I would hope to high heaven that she wouldn’t kill us on the way there because she drove like she was playing bass for the Red Hot Chili Peppers (fully clothed, but you get the idea).  Once, on the way to work, she mentioned that she had just seen Hiromi at the Tokyo Jazz Festival, and I got excited because most of the Japanese people I met had heard of her or seen her on television but weren’t necessarily fans.  Then again, I didn’t hang out in Japanese jazz circles.  But apparently Shiori did.  I hadn’t gotten tickets on time because I wasn't used to her selling out huge arenas back in America, so I actually waited out front with a sign hoping someone would sell me an extra ticket.  It only took about ten minutes, actually, and they sold it at face value because Japanese people have high standards of honesty.  I was happy to get in, but even happier to find out a few days later that Shiori had been to the same show and could hook me up with a ticket to Hiromi's next show a few months later.  Tickets were already going fast for that one too.  She also got our co-worker to come along, a musician named Ben Grace who didn’t know Hiromi but became an instant convert.  We saw the show from the upper deck, but it was honestly the best performance I’d ever seen in my life.  Seeing someone perform so expertly and gracefully in the service of beauty filled me with more confidence to pursue my dreams than any other event in my life.  I clapped so hard that my hands vibrated with joy.

Then there’s Scott Merrifield, a man from Winnipeg whom I lived and worked alongside in Japan.  Once I was freaking out about everything in my life, and he talked me down with calm cool rationality and intelligent advice on how to open up my outlook to more positive possibilities.  He’s the last person I said good bye to when I left Japan.
 

The last time I saw Jack he used his “they’re going to expire anyway” Delta dollars to get me a plane ticket from San Francisco to Mexico City.  He was on his way to the Peace Corps in Tonga and wouldn’t need them.  He encouraged me to be confident and courageous in my first attempts at hitchhiking, and not to lose stamina when my tent was surrounded by snow.  He’d never done the particular route or journey which I had mapped out, but he had hitchhiked out west and ridden his bike across the country, so he knew what he was talking about.  That was in 2010, right before my first cross-country journey.  I haven’t seen him since.  He just got back to America a few months ago.  I've traveled across the country twice and taught English abroad since the last time I saw him, not to mention surviving hitchhiking and camping in the snow.  I can only imagine what stories he'll have to share.

The last time I saw Sarah was in late 2010, in Los Angeles, with her soon to be fiance and husband, Jimmy.  I didn’t realize his future significance at the time, but I’d met him at breakfast in Prince Edward Island two years earlier.  She follows her television and film writing dreams with more discipline than any writer I've ever seen.  After breakfast they dropped me off by the highway at my request so I could try to hitchhike to San Francisco.

The last time I played basketball was against my friend Brad Cone almost a year ago.  He won the first game and I won the second game.  His favorite song in the yearbook is "Californication".

The last time I saw Linda was at my sister's wedding.  I had just returned from seven months of traveling around the world.  She got her boyfriend and my friend Rob to form a temporary band with us, and we sang two songs for my sister and her husband.  I wore a Mad Hatter's hat and conducted the opening notes to "All You Need is Love" with a bamboo walking stick while Rob and Christolph strummed guitars and Linda did these crazy jazzy kazoo solos.  It's the closest I'll ever get to being a Red Hot Chili Pepper.

Speaking of songs, there's only one thing I can think of to transform the Canadian tundra into a garden during March, and that's music.  After all, we started with a passport getting a Woodstock stamp.  The seven best songs written by Canadians are as follows:

The Weight - The Band
Helpless - Neil Young

Feel Good Lost - Broken Social Scene

Rainy Night House - Joni Mitchell
Woodstock - Joni Mitchell

I Feel It All - Feist

Free to Be You and Me - New Seekers

"We are stardust, we are golden, 
we are caught in the devil's bargain,

and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

-Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

"Deep inside the Garden of Eden, 
I'm standing there with my hard on bleeding

There's a devil in my dick and some demons in my semen
Good God no that would be treason
Believe me Eve she gave good reason..."

-Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sir Psycho Sexy

"Behind the lash and the circles blue
He looked as only a priest can, through
And his eyes said me and his eyes said you
And my eyes said, let us try"
 
-Joni Mitchell, The Priest


"I don't EVER want to feel like I did that day..."

-Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under the Bridge


"I stayed up all night
just to watch thee
to see
who in the world you might be
and what you might mean to me."

-Joni Mitchell, Rainy Night House


"A nervous breakthrough that makes us the same
Bless your heart, girl "

-Red Hot Chili Peppers, Parallel Universe

"There's a land that I see,

where the children are free

And I say it ain't far

to this land from where we are
Take my hand, come with me
Where the children are free
Come with me take my hand
And we'll live
In a land where the river runs free
In a land through the green country
In a land to a shining sea 

Where you and me
are free to be

you and me

-New Seekers, Free to Be You and Me

I've been hearing that last one on family road trips as long as I can remember.

It's the first song I remember hearing