This summer we spend a week in the Vancouvers, where we eat every fish, drink every beer, hug every tree, kiss every cloud, climb up every sunbeam, roll down every mountain, count every pine needle, dodge every raindrop.

While wandering the West End we pass a busy dessert shop whose walk-up window is accented on one side by an enormous 3D vanilla soft-serve cone with a handwritten paper sign taped to it reading: Please Do Not Touch This.

At the Vancouver Art Gallery we reverently view a great many tree paintings by Emily Carr, who signed her later canvases Emily Carr and her earlier ones M. Emily Carr, M for Millie, though I prefer to imagine that it’s M for Memily.

Some Vancouvers we visit: Downtown Vancouver, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, East Vancouver, Familiar Vancouver, Strange Vancouver, Future Vancouver, Past Vancouver, Collapse Of Civilization Vancouver, Moodyville.

Roughly halfway up the Sea-to-Sky Highway, on the outskirts of Squamish, we stop at a place apostrophelessly named Narwhals Ice Cream and enjoy some homemade ice cream that as far as I can tell is 100% narwhal-free.

Downtown we sample meads earthy of infusion (lavender, lingonberry, wild cherry bark) and one of us buys a used book whose first page declares: Now, look, I have wearied of my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey.

Decadent sushi, Dutch French toast, North Van southern BBQ, Commercial Drive Cuban, wilderness deli wraps, burning-dorm poke bowls, fruity beers with tough-guy names, my first cups of actual coffee in eight actual years.

I see on the wall next to an installation in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s central stairwell a small printed advisory that I kind of wish could be posted in all art galleries everywhere: Please watch your step. This work may be disorienting.

At English Bay Beach Park I watch a crow swoop down and land with malice aforethought directly on a seagull, knocking the seagull off a picnic table, and then I swear the crow looks right at me and shrugs its feathers meanly.

The Vancouvers’ forests are oceans, their trees are mountains, their rains are tides, and their coastlines are storms; the Vancouvers’ rocks are maps, their roots are clocks, their waves are directions, and their skies are instructions.

Happiest of twentieth anniversaries to my mellifluous particle of snickering anti­matter. With love from your quavering ambient of post­cosmic vacuum.

TGIF, welcome weekend, there’s nothing out there and there never was, we’re not alone and we never were, it’s only you and me here and it always has been, we’re both here together and we always have been, cheers.

Postscript: This might be me, in a rental car in Florida, circa May 2022, though it might not be. Could I really be lucky enough to have been pseudo-immortalized on Google Street View twice? May 2022 is when I undergo a final trip to Punta Gorda, Florida, so that Hermano Dave and I can help our mother declutter her recently-sold-but-still-clutter-filled house, in preparation for her move out of the state. And while I’m there, I happen to see a Street View camera car drive north past me as I’m stopped on US-41 N in the left-turn lane at Aqui Esta Drive in my rented 2017 Siren Red Chevy Equinox. Now, the above Street View capture dated May 2022 shows what appears to be a Siren Red Equinox in that very spot, but there are many days in May, and there are probably many Punta Gordans driving around in Siren Red Equinoxes, and no identifying features of the driver are visible through any of the windows, and at the moment when the Street View car goes by at Aqui Esta I’m not quick enough to offer Google another very mature salute of rudeness. So there’s no way I can prove it is or isn’t me. In any case, confronting my mother’s house’s absolute apocalypse of accursed clutter is so brain-fryingly anxiety-inducing for me that even if it is me in the photo, it really isn’t. By the way, aquí está is Spanish for: here it is.

This is me, in our car, circa October 2020, flipping the bird at the Google Street View camera car as it passes by, the offending digit blurred out by billions of dollars’ worth of machine learning but still dimly discernible in the driver’s side window. I regret nothing. Google knows what they did.

Sometime after I get that first screenshot, though, that angle disappears from Google Maps and is replaced with this subsequent view in which my bird-flip is less visible! But I assure you the bird is there. I am honoured to have been both immortalized on Google Street View and purged from it.

My California halo selfie keeps reminding me of my old Duolingo avatar. Duolingo’s avatar builder offers a great many face-customization options but unsurprisingly a salt-and-pepper beard is not among them. The above is the best I could do. — I subject myself to Duolingo’s French language course for seven years, from 2018 until 2025, and I finally retire from it when my streak reaches day 2600. Something that sticks in my mind is that back in the early years, I encounter a glitch wherein the French lessons start giving me the same one sentence over and over again even after I speak it or type it correctly, and not in a spaced repetition kind of way, but more in a brute-force brainwashing kind of way. The sentence is: On ne te déteste pas. Which means: We do not hate you. Initially it’s nice to see and hear this kindly, compassionate claim uttered several times a day by Duolingo’s cast of smiling staring infantile cartoon vector-beings, but after a time it induces a peculiar state of derangement. It’s like what Twain says in Following the Equator about the song of the Italian cue-owl: At first it is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; then excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener is a maniac. (Note: Duolingo’s mascot, Duo, is an owl.) On ne te déteste pas. On ne te déteste pas. On ne te déteste pas. On ne te déteste pas. OK, I get it! Thank you all very much for not hating me! I don’t hate you either! Now s’il vous plaît fuck off! — Eventually the glitch goes away and my lessons continue and I learn a lot mais j’oublie presque tout.

I am grateful that erasing.org is the last blog, the last web journal, the last personal website. I am grateful that it has never had comments, has never allowed likes, has never made any money, and has never been a podcast. I am grateful that its numbers are incredible, its letters inexhaustible, its performance unimprovable, and its author unemployable. I am grateful that erasing is the opposite of writing, of drawing, of recording, of saving.

In California we witness a 22° halo while hiking in Mount Diablo State Park. A pleasant convergence of the angelic and the demonic. In order to take a selfie with a 22° halo in the early afternoon, you must turn your back on the sun and position your phone in the centre of your own shadow, and then you have to sort of bow down, as if to the dirt or the landscape or the Earth, and once you’re bowing at the correct inclination, only then will your phone screen reward you with a portrait of yourself as a rejected Renaissance saint.

I have a new worry stone now. This one even kind of looks worried, doesn’t it. A sepulchral melange of dark greys at once both gunmetal and stormcloud, riddled with wabi-sabi fissures and pits despite the stone’s well-machined polish. (Stormmetal? Guncloud? Worry-sabi? Wabi-stone?) Even more worrying: It is an American worry stone. I buy it two weeks ago while Laura and I are in Northern California to see Hermano Dave, Kat-in-Law, Nephew Nico (who recently turned seven), and my mother (who recently turned Californian). Naturally this new worry stone, like so many other examples one might care to name of California’s benevolent and life-enhancing and mental-health-improving technological products, is a model of good user experience design. I hold it between thumb and forefinger and perform a few simple gestures, and nothing happens. Another satisfied customer.

I don’t knowcare and I don’t careknow, and I don’t mind­know­care and I don’t care­know­mind, and I don’t un­der­stand­mind­know­care and I don’t care­know­mind­un­der­stand, but most of all I don’t re­mem­ber­un­der­stand­mind­know­care and I don’t care­know­mind­un­der­stand­re­mem­ber, and I don’t want to.

I broke my worry stone. Four months ago I buy the worry stone from a local metaphysical supply boutique, i.e. a Gettin’ Place for all things astrological and witchy, and though my consciousness is nowhere near evolved enough to cross into the mist-enfolded realms of auras and divinations and healing crystals and consultation with ancestors and so on, lately I’m in a place where I’d just really like to be consoled by a small smooth flat shiny rock. I’m not sure the worry stone truly performs as advertised at transmuting panic and fear into patience and fortitude when held in a worried hand, but it’s still somehow nice to have around, resting within reach on table or desk or shelf, beaming out its 5GHz signal of eldritch serenity. Then last weekend I accidentally knock the worry stone off the table and it falls onto the floor and breaks into two pieces. Laura immediately says All your worries are over.

This spring we’re doing things a bit differently. The sun will emit sunshine, but now so will the horizon. Flowers will colourfully burst into bloom, but so will the wind and the clouds and the snakes and the lizards. Trees’ buds will sprout and turn green, but the trees’ trunks and roots and branches will also turn green, and the melodious birds that dive from the sky to alight on the branches will themselves turn green, and the sky into which they return greenly singing will turn the greenest green of all. The snow and ice will melt as usual, but everything they touch will melt too, flowing out into the waters of rivers and lakes and seas and underground oceans, and somehow even the waters will then find a way to melt, flowing out into the Earth, and the Earth will then melt, flowing out into space, and space will then melt, and so on, until autumn. Clocks will turn forward another hour each night.

Tomorrow night Nine Inch Nails kills me dead and extinguishes my ecstatic soul’s weeping wave function and dissolves my unholy mortal remains in a transdimensional dancing fountain of thermonuclear rock n’ roll hot sauce. I’ll try to enjoy it. I look forward to the light show. See you on the other side.

Three days till No Introduction Иecessary takes my horse to the Old Town Road and rides till they can’t no more. Numbing Industrial Иoise. Nonstop Inner Иarrative. Nihilistic Identity Иightmare. Nineties’ Incredible Иaïveté. Nowhere Is Иice. Nothing I Иeed. Now Isn’t Иever. Nostalgic I’m Иot.

Five days till Nine Inch Nails boils the flesh off my bones in a shrieking hot whirlpool of my teenage self’s tears. Hope it isn’t a faux pas to attend a rock show of livid misanthropic hellfire, execration, and vitriol while wearing ear protection from a brand named Happy Ears. At least I have them in black.

Seven days till Nine Inch Nails piledrives my self-help psychobabblings and powerbombs my therapy bingo words. This’ll be my first time seeing them live. I almost see them in the fall of 2005 but it doesn’t happen. At the time Hermano Dave is living in San Francisco and he gets tickets for the two of us to see them at the Oakland Coliseum, and I fly out to stay with him for the week, but at the last minute the show is cancelled. (It’s ultimately rescheduled for six weeks later, but I’m unable to return to California for the new date.) On what would’ve been the night of the concert, we instead walk over to the Independent and see Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing with opening act Erin McKeown. And it’s pretty fun! Sure it’s kind of too bad that my first trip to California denies me the chance to have my fresh twenty­something face liquefied by Quarant Reznor on the With Teeth tour, but I appreciate that that night I get to witness the Queen of Quiet crushing the showtune “Rhode Island Is Famous For You,” and Mr. Bitterness cheekily covering “Paradise City” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “The Gambler,” and an intimate venue’s worth of Bay Area dirtbag indie-rock hipsters all singing You got to know when to hold ’em! Know when to fold ’em! Know when to walk away! Know when to run! even though I don’t know any of those four things.

Nine days till Nine Inch Nails violently subjects my feelings to explosive decompression and reduces them to purest acceptance-jelly. Today is the ninth. Am I really going through with this? If you subtract from any integer the sum of its digits, the result is always a multiple of 9. Also, the sum of the digits of any nonzero multiple of 9 is always 9 or another multiple of 9.

Twelve days till Nine Inch Nails electroconvulses my prefrontal cortex into a frolicking heap of catharsis-kittens. Slightly belated confession: I hold the dubious distinction of having started the #nineinchnailsfoodtrucks hashtag that ends up trending on Twitter one day back in the innocent summer of 2013. At first it’s just me and a few timeline friends amusing ourselves, but then Maura signal-boosts it to her follower army of Gen-X pop-music smartasses and very quickly all hell breaks loose. Some of my contributions: March Of The Pork Bellies. The Downward Special. Lunch Is Not Enough. The Becrumbing. And All That Could Have Beans. How To Destroy Angel Food Cakes. A Warm Plate. Wrap (With Decay). Some tweets by others that somehow all these years later continue to live rent-free in my mind: Bread Like A Bowl. Samosa I Can Never Have. Hyperchowder! TERRIBLE FRIES!

Fourteen days till Nine Inch Nails drains the blood from my body. YouTube comment on “Erased, Over, Out”: This is the type of music that Daleks listen to.

Sixteen days till Nine Inch Nails incinerates this city and everyone in it. In honour of the halfway point of winter I am listening to “The Way Out is Through.” In honour of the condition of our streets and sidewalks I am listening to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack’s “Hidden in Snow.” In honour of Groundhog Day I am listening to “Every Day Is Exactly the Same.” In honour of the temperature and this post I am listening to “All Time Low.”

Much to my surprise and terror, Soixant Reznor and his merry men will be descending upon the lifeless frozen winterfilth of downtown Hamilton in eighteen days, to perform selections from their rich back catalog of feel-good sing-along ditties at a newly-renovated arena a mere five minutes’ walk from our home. I have nervously purchased a ticket. What will I wear?

In 2025: My inner child and I continue to wander this stormy dream-beach we find ourselves lost on, where, despite the weather and topography, we every so often fling ourselves down to scribble in the sand. Happy new year.

I didn’t know what to give you so I got you this gift card redeemable for unlimited blankness, silence, absence, stillness, disengagement, disconnection, unproductivity, unambition, cessation, seclusion, removal, refusal, noncompliance, nonparticipation, unaccomplishment, unconcern, calming meaninglessness, soothing uselessness, relaxing profitlessness, rejuvenating directionlessness, voluptuous renunciations, decadent abandonments, exhilarating abnegations, and various and sundry additional nothingnesses to be named later. Valid everywhere. Expires never. Subject to no conditions. Check your balance at about:blank.

Unfollow, unsubscribe, close tab, close account, unlike, unfavourite, leave page, leave group. I have it on good authority that it’s all going to be OK. Those bad things that could happen, they’re not going to happen. And if by some ridiculous chance they do happen, or if they’re already happening, they aren’t going be as bad as you think they’ll be, and they’ll lead to such ridiculously good things that you’ll think it was actually ridiculously good that the bad things happened, and that they happened when they did, right at the right time, and got it all over with. So the consolations say, yes? Let’s believe them just for laughs. It’s snowing again and I’m drinking a bottomless mug of yerba mate green tea mixed with matcha genmaicha green tea and it’s been seven years since I gave up coffee and this is what my life has come to. Also all those things that you always feel that you’re supposed to do or think or say or deal with, guess what, you don’t have to do or think or say or deal with them. Any of them. Effective immediately! There are no supposers. Nor are there expecters. Or requirers. Maybe there used to be, but they’ve fucked off. You yourself told them to fuck off, even though you may not have known you did, but you did, perhaps directly or perhaps by subtle suggestion, and either way they followed orders and fucked off. Green tea is just warm water and leaf-dust and a light caress of caffeine and a hundred thousand million billion merciless antioxidants dooming me to long life. Actually maybe it was me who told them to fuck off? It’s possible. Anything is possible. Maybe I saw or sensed that you were being tormented or intimidated or deep-fried to extra-crispy by those nonexistent supposers and expecters and requirers and I intervened on your behalf, sorry not sorry, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’m pretty sure you told them yourself. We’re in this together, whoever we are, whatever this is, wherever together is. Here and now. Health and wellness. Form and emptiness. Save and quit.

Vingt ans dans ce pays vaste, vide, froid, fort, désolé, doux, lumineux, libre.

I’m grateful
For having been forty-eightful

I’m mindful
Of now being forty-nineful

I don’t fear
My forties’ final year

I’m prepared
To be seven squared

Hello from the inside of a jack o’ lantern, from the centre of a spiderweb, from the top of a creaking stair, from the bottom floor of a catacomb. Hello from halfway between trick and treat, between toil and trouble, between sickle and scythe, between hallowed and heathen. Hello from the footsteps in the attic and the bonfires in the fields and the draft under the door and the skull under the skin. Hello from a rattle of chains and a rustle of wings. Hello from all the saints and all the souls. Hello from ancient superstition and brand new bad luck. Hello from the full moon that howls right back.