July 19-24, 2001 — The only thing that we have

I've just finished reading the last few days of Neil Gaiman's journal, and I'm starting to understand what people mean when they say that they're looking forward to seeing how I write about something that they were involved in. Going to his reading was lots more fun than I had expected it to be, and I had expected it to be worth taking a couple of days off work and travelling five hours to Toronto for. But more on that later...

This is another of those journals that I had planned to split into two parts. But I'd planned that before I started to write, and now that I've started to write, I've decided that I don't have the energy to write quite that much. So the three concerts, the one reading, and the many hours of stress-addled phone calls can all share the same cramped space as I arbitrarily cut bits and pieces from the last few days. But since I'm leaving for KrazyFest tomorrow, I think this is the only way.

Last Thursday I went to my first Ottawa concert in quite some time -- Thursday, The Movielife, Rise Against, and Boy Sets Fire. Thursday played a decent set and the lead singer looked to have been practising his impressions of Cedric from At The Drive-In. The Movielife was my reason for going and was most definitely worth seeing live, although the crowd wasn't very into it. I missed most of Rise Against. Boy Sets Fire was better than I had been led to believe (which'll teach me for listening to Web sites that insist on referring to them as Boy Hits Car). I bought a t-shirt that has a silver switchblade-style comb over top of The Movielife written in red, and all was well in the world.

On Thursday night, I did my best to get my luggage packed for my trip to Toronto. I remembered almost everything that I needed to remember.

Friday dragged along until it was time for me to catch me bus. I was too exhausted to do much of anything after arriving in Toronto, so I ate dinner and took the subway to my aunt's house, where I was staying. I was asleep before 8:00 pm.

Saturday was a stressful day as I tried to juggle far too many commitments. I was trying to investigate a house for Laura while getting messages on my pager from people in faraway area codes about the DJ set that I was supposed to attend at Canada's Wonderland that night, after which I was supposed to find my way to Oshawa. I bought one of those long-distance phone cards at a convenience store and spent most of my day dialing extremely long access codes and phone numbers into payphones.

By the end of the day, I was on a bus to Canada's Wonderland. After an hour and several kilometres of walking and an evil, grumpy fellow working the gate for guestlist passes, I finally made it inside. And after some time discussing the Web site with James (and some time telling random children that Lil' Romeo was playing and watching them panic as they began to think they were missing him), I caught a bus to Oshawa.

I met Jeff at a show at the Masonic Temple in Oshawa. When I arrived, the band (whose name eludes me) was playing "Hammer To Hell." Their lead singer's microphone was encased in a hammer. Needless to say, lucite guitars were involved and "Crotch Rocket" was one of their more crowd-pleasing offerings. Equally needless to say, Jeff was loving every minute of it.

We left the show before Scratching Post began to play. The next few hours were a blur as I managed to avoid both entering a strip club and gawking at mostly naked (and quite thoroughly drunk) underage girls make out with one another (and with a member of the aforementioned band whose name rhymes with "Scratching Post").

The next day, I was supposed to see one of the houses that our rental agent had sent us the advertisement for. The ad itself was a bit deceptive about the location and it was further away than I thought it would be on foot, so I was fifteen minutes late. Needless to say, the real estate person had already left and my time was mostly wasted. I've decided that I'm going to live at home forever. It's easier this way.

And then there was the reason for my trip: the Neil Gaiman reading. I arrived plenty early and had my choice of seats, along with the girl who had taken the train from New York. I can't remember the last time that I was read to, and it made me feel like a kid again. He read the entire first chapter and a speech from later in the book that has a character listing the things that she believes in. You can learn a lot about the audience at a Neil Gaiman reading by taking into account the immense amounts of laughter (forcing a pause in the middle of the speech) at the part that goes,

I believe . . . that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I'm not going to pretend that I wasn't laughing and smiling, too; just saying is all -- it's not everyday you find yourself in a room in which quantum physics humour gets the biggest laughs.

Gaiman also proved to be an excellent speaker during the question-and-answer bit. He spoke a lot about Harry Stephen Keeler, an American author that I'd never heard of before and that I now know enough about to stay away from. (Given the price tag in the hundreds of dollars that accompanies his mostly-out-of-print books, anyway.) His summary of a Harry Stephen Keeler plot was hilarious.

The signing itself was exciting and disappointing at the same time. I was barely able to choke out my name; it was the first time that I had felt star-struck in quite a long time. It just all seemed to be over so fast -- I said hello, and moments later I'd given him my name and had fairly generic greetings scrawled into the front of "Neverwhere" and "American Gods." It was what I had expected all along, really, but I'd still clung on to this notion that maybe it would be a bit more personal than what you'd expect as one of 300 people getting a book signed in a span of ninety minutes or so.

I left the library in an excellent mood, smiling widely and wanting desperately to write a book. I haven't written anything beyond my journal in a long time, but I'd still like to try. Someday.

The next day, I caught the bus back to Ottawa. Life went on. And then came KrazyFest. . .