I’m not truly “home”, since home is now in Spain…but I am back in Montreal (with travel insurance to visit my own country, if you can imagine). My three month ticket return date came up, and since all my Spanish paperwork is now in order (and thus I should be able to legally re-enter the country), I decided to take a three-week jaunt across Canada by plane, train and automobile. First to Montreal, then out west to see my sister and her new daughter, then more family. (If “more family” sounds dismissive, please — it isn’t. I’ll be glad to see everyone; it’s just that having a two-month-old niece is particularly exciting.)

It’s a great time to be in Montreal, of course: the street fair, fireworks competition, Jazz Fest (starting later this week). The place probably hasn’t changed that much in the three months I’ve been away, yet it’s undergone the spring to summer transition (which is always dramatic, and not only in the amount of clothing people wear) and all the restaurants have new menus, prices bumped up by $0.25 (best case) to $2.00 or more. Guess this is the price of oil, food…or just opportunism, with a new tourist season heating up?

The other noticeable change is the proliferation of bicycles. Montreal has always been a big biking city with great bike paths (more developed and bike-friendly than Barcelona in almost every way except for Bicing). But there are so many new bike paths this year that bikes are especially viable, even for people who need to commute to and from downtown. Bikes are absolutely everywhere. There are new links that run down avenue du Parc, along de Maisonneuve…it’s impressive (and makes me a little jealous) to see all the new developments. Hopefully Montreal will learn some things from Barcelona’s “public biking” approach, but Barcelona could learn plenty from Montreal, too.

The exciting news from today is that I bought my annual supply of underwear and socks at the St. Laurent street sale (wonderfully named La Frénésie de la Main). But it had a nice Spanish(-language, at least) touch — I bought them from a latina shopkeeper (hablamos español). Meanwhile Spain was playing Italy (two emotional forces of La Main, especially now that Portugal is out) on the big screens in every bar and restaurant around. Spain eventually won the Euro 2008 match in a kickoff, so it’s into the semi-finals for them (I mean, for us).

I guess I must adjust to new situations quickly, because although it’s really good to be here, I’ll be glad to (when the time comes) go back to Barcelona. In Spain, probably I go on too much about how great Canada is for this or that. But here in Canada, I don’t find myself saying: “Phew, finally I’m back in a land where things makes sense,” but instead going on about how great it is…back home.

What have I been doing for the last few hours, days, weeks? I’ve been writing letters and calling companies, governments, departments, divisions and issuing bodies, telling them to take me off their lists, to move me, to update or cancel me, to erase me. My life on one continent is shrinking, is being torn down, dusted off, shredded and recycled. All is being sold off, given away, chucked out, boxed in and loaded on a ship for ports unknown (or even better, if I pick the right shipping company: known).

I am busy, fully conscious of the passing days, the backward-ticking stopwatch, the anticipation and excitement building even as nostalgia and premature longing poke their noses from around the corner behind me. I feel lighter, unburdened and at times exhilarated by the rush of change. Sure, I do feel anxiety — a little, but not as much as you (or I) might think. It’s probably waiting for me on the other end, around some dark corner of the Barri Gòtic or in an eternal lineup at the Foreigner’s Office, but for now I’m too busy savouring my last moments in Montreal.

The weekend consisted of two beautiful sunny days, the reflecting snow and ice blinding me and burning a late-summer glow into my cheeks as I raced around a frozen lake, alone both days, free, gliding, flying. If my visa was so delayed, perhaps it was only to give me such a great gift: a perfect Montreal winter, one like we haven’t seen for years, maybe decades (before my time here, at any rate). So much snow, so little melting, such pleasant temperatures.

As of yesterday, I have a valid visa in my passport, aching for its duty to be fulfilled by an immigration officer’s stamp. The house sale is “in the bag”, the final handoff going down in a couple more weeks, so all else must be done by then. After that, I’ll take a deep breath, spend one homeless week here with friends and then it’s off over the ocean (flying 35,000 feet above my few remaining possessions as they slosh through the North Atlantic) to a new land, a new life, and a patiently-waiting love.

In Montreal, it never rains but it snows. (What do you know? It’s doing just that, right now.)

¡Felices fiestas! Joyeuses fêtes! Best “holiday wishes” to all! And a Merry Christmas for those who are into such things (personally, I’m having a decidedly un-Christmasy Christmas this year…).

Life’s all about sacrifices: I ruined a UV filter not long after taking this shot; a hot firework fragment landed on it! So that’s why they tell you to always protect your lens with a filter…

Have a healthy, creative year in 2008 (no need to wait until then to start!)… Listen to music (like love, it’s even better if you make it); be obscenely generous; stop buying stuff you don’t need; take a step to the left in the reduce-reuse-recycle hierarchy; quit making unnecessary trips to the washroom; start using your full brain (not just the 10% you thought you could slide by on); enjoy your fingernails while they’re still growing. Really, you have no more excuses! Now, stop whining that the turkey is making you sleepy…

This evening, a friend and I went to “An Evening with Oliver Sacks,” at McGill University. Dr. Sacks is a neurologist and author of many books, including Awakenings (turned into a movie with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He was speaking about topics from his new book: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. It was a sold-out house of around 500 (and overflowing into a second room).

He spoke about relationships between the brain and music. He touched on various special musical gifts but also pathologies, such as amusia (inability to discern or appreciate music), “earworms” (translation of the German term for those annoying songs or jingles that get stuck in your head), Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and how they respond to musical therapy, musical hallucinations… It was all very interesting.

No surprise here, but it turns out the brain is highly active, and in many different areas, when music is being listened to, played, composed. It is more “broadly” active than with speech or visual processing; regions of the “upper brain” as well as the older, more primitive/automatic regions of the brain get in on the action. Rhythm, melody, harmony…all help activate different regions.

The bit about musical hallucinations was fascinating, if a bit scary. When it occurs (quite rare), it often seems to be linked to the onset of hearing loss. Not exclusively, though; there are young children who scream and tell their parents to “turn off the radio!” The main point here seems to be that if one of the senses stops getting input, the brain “needs to do something“, and will dig into memory and invent something, giving a kind of internal playlist. And there really seems to be something to that whole “blind piano tuner” thing. There are a disproportionate number of blind people with perfect pitch, compared to the normal population. Especially blind people who never had sight, which means all that free “real estate” in their brains can get diverted into processing other sensory inputs…should be no surprise, then, that they have more developed senses of smell, hearing, taste.

One of the patients he saw at his clinic in NY had severe Alzheimer’s. He was so far gone that he was unaware of what he’d done for a living, where he was, what he’d done a few minutes before…yet he was able to sing at a professional level, in his same beautiful baritone voice. He had been performing with a group for years and still was able to perform, even though he had no idea where he was, how he’d got there, or how to tie a bow tie. This same man had also been an avid tennis player. He could no longer recognize a tennis racquet or guess what it was for. But if you stood him in a tennis court with a racquet in his hand and lobbed a ball at him, he would start playing a “mean game of tennis.”

Another man, a life-long stage actor, is also stricken with severe Alzheimer’s, yet able to perform Shakespeare (in fact is on stage in NY right now). This reminds me of my own grandmother, who is far down the Alzheimer’s road, yet can still appreciate and sing along to the songs my aunt sings. She was an English schoolteacher her whole life, and loved poetry. Even in her current state, if you give her a line from A. A. Milne, she’ll say the next line.

So, these “performances,” these routines people program themselves with for a lifetime, seem to be among the brain’s strongest connections. They remain even when names, dates, words, facts and details are long past the reach of recall. With Alzheimer’s, music therapy generally focuses on emotional connections to childhood memories; songs the person may have heard and enjoyed, say, when they were younger than 20. Music really seems to be one of the “last things to go.” The benefits of a music therapy session may last for several hours after it has ended. I got the impression Dr. Sacks (now 74) was a devotee of classical music. I wonder if, in sixty years, the music therapists will be playing Ice Cube, Skinny Puppy and Shakira, thereby tending to the earliest musical memories of their patients?

With Parkinson’s, music therapy takes a different tack. Here, the most important thing is the music’s rhythm. Parkinson’s is a disease that takes away voluntary movement. Musical rhythms seem to help activate and synchronize the motor skills, to literally “get the patient moving” (for example, dancing). But here, the effect is lost as soon as the music is switched off.

In a similar way, some patients who’ve had strokes that affected the front left lobe of the brain (speech centre), are still able to access language and words — i.e. communicate — through song. There is much more research and possible therapy going on in all these areas.

Dr. Sacks has been on a book tour, but he said it was special for him to be in Montreal, home of Dr. Penfield’s Montreal Neurological Institute, where so much top music/brain research is being done.

In the conversations around me, after the lecture, the main comment I heard was along these lines: “Well, guess tomorrow I need to start singing/learning an instrument/dancing/[insert musical thing you’ve always wanted to do]. Practicing every day. To stave off the dementia, give me a few more years…” And it seems there just may be something to that.

“Fall back.” Or “fall in line?” That’s what we did last night; later than usual this year, because we have to copy whatever the Americans do. Actually, why does the magic have to end? I wish we were on Daylight Savings Time all year round.

Winter is coming, and I guess we’re all depressed and miserable, because apparently we’re no longer interested in “saving daylight.” Some may fight to save seals, whales or the entire planet (keeners!), but “daylight” is just not worth the effort? Sorry, Sun, you’re just not cute and cuddly enough.

Personally I’d rather save as much of it as I can, especially in Montreal, where too many of our hours are “wasted” due of our ridiculous positioning at the eastern end of a huge time zone — we already have sunset about an hour too early for our latitude. Who really needs it to start getting light at 4:30am in June? Barcelona is only about four degrees south of here, so its day is of pretty similar length, yet sunrise and sunset are about an hour later than here, year-round.

Sigh.

Speaking of Barcelona, I’m still waiting for news on my visa (”supposed” to be processed in three months). I spoke to the Consulate again this week, and this time I got some real news. First of all, turns out I’m only one of two people waiting for a residence visa (at this office). Actually, only one of one, because the other guy finally got his visa this week. And he applied at the start of June… I applied near the end of June, so hopefully I’ll hear something this month. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Fingers crossed that the darkest time of the year will bring me some happiness.

At least, that’s where they seem to be going, these days. Things are falling down, whether it’s the Concorde overpass in Montreal last year (five dead), the I35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis a month ago (13 dead) or the recent collapse of a bridge under construction in Fenghuang, China (at least 36 dead). And there are plenty of bridges in bad shape in the U.S. (and in Canada and elsewhere in the world, too!).

And as recently as this past weekend, there were more scares. In Montreal, a big section of downtown was closed for much of the weekend over fears a concrete slab in the “underground city” would collapse. It has been shored up with many supporting pylons, surely not a permanent solution.

Other bridges, such as the ten-year-old Confederation Bridge to PEI, seem to be doing just fine. Excuse me, did you say…TEN years old? I should hope not!

But today is the anniversary of another major collapse disaster. The Pont de Québec had its first (and most disastrous) collapse one hundred years ago today. It is an event Canadian engineers often learn about in their first-year classes; it is a lesson in responsibility, human error and humility. Some initial calculations weren’t checked and the bridge couldn’t even support its own weight. It collapsed under construction, killing 75 workers. Apparently, at 17h37 today (local time), church bells in many communities will ring, to mark the anniversary and commemorate the dead.

Last night I had a bit of a “thrill.” I was at home, alone, watching some TV, getting ready for bed. The new neighbours across the back lane were having a big party on their terrace (basically on the roof of the restaurant below them). I’ve heard them playing music before, having a few friends over for dinner outside, but this was different. It was LOUD. Was it a housewarming or something else? Who knows, but there were around 100 people there. The place was really hopping, inside and out. Looking down from my own terrace, I could see flashing disco lights inside, people drinking and dancing, streamers decorating the terrace, tons of folks outside chatting, smoking, taking photos of each other with their camera phones. They were having a great time. Hey, live and let live, man.

It was after midnight. My house, as usual, was still cooling from a hot day, so there was no doubt that I had to sleep with the windows and patio door open. I harnessed my newfound tolerance…after all, everyone is entitled to a noisy party from time to time, right? And this was the first really noisy one from these new neighbours. Imagine if I were now living in Spain — I had to get used to people and noise. Relax. Don’t call the police. Don’t do anything.

Still, I turned my back light on just to let them know someone was there. I turned it back out. I went out back and watched them for a while, my passive-aggressive side getting the best of me. Just to let them know they’re not alone; there are other people in the world. Maybe they’d realize the time and turn down that subwoofer a bit. It went back out to watch a few times — not only to “send a message” (as if!), but also because it was fun. Fun to watch the social interactions from afar, like a little colony of social bees or ants. I meant them no harm, and they meant me none. Or so I thought.

I went inside for awhile, getting ready for bed. I was tired and figured maybe I could sleep, even with the music and chatter. No big deal. I brushed my teeth, then went back out for one last look. I was startled to find some people looking back at me. One guy pointed…or was he waving? What was going on?

Then a guy climbed down their fire escape to the lane. I looked down, over my railing. There were several other guys climbing my fire esacpe.

“Red shirt!” someone shouted, from the party. Many people were pointing my way. “Hey, RED SHIRT!”

Yes, I was wearing a red shirt. More and more guys started pouring out of the party, into the lane, and up our stairwell. The first guy had made it up the three flights to my back door (I was still one level up, “safe” on my terrace, looking down at them with a nauseating sense that something big was about to happen. No, this did not bode well.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Now, I should have been the one asking that question, but it was one of them. Now there were five or six angry faces, two metres below, looking up at me. “How do we get up there?”

“You can’t come up here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“You’re the asshole throwing tomatoes at us.” What? “You been throwing eggs.”

“No!” I said. I couldn’t believe this.

“We’re coming up. We’ve got to check it out.”

“No, you can’t…” There are no outside stairs from the third level up to where I was, on my terrace. But as we’d been talking, already two guys had climbed, ninja-style, up onto the lower storage shed, leaping up to grab the railing above, and now stood towering above me from the shed on my terrace. My knees were shaking. What to do? I couldn’t just run inside to call the police, that would look really bad. I’d look guilty. No, stand my ground. I was innocent. I only had to convince them. Still, they were steaming mad, a little inebriated, and I suspected I was in for a beating — an undeserved beating based on a misunderstanding. For a moment, I imagined my friends reading a news item about me in tomorrow’s paper. Is this what they called a domestic disturbance? Was any of them “packing?”

I guess someone in our block had been so pissed off by the party noise that they’d thrown something down, across the lane. A dangerous and stupid move. But the party people had only seen me, my head suspiciously “popping up” from time to time on my terrace and then disappearing again. I’ll admit the music irritated me a bit, but I would never throw anything. I’m passive-aggressive, not aggressive-aggressive! But…could I convince a crowd — now of ten guys — of that? Some stood on the terrace with me, snooping into my house, others stood on the thin metal roof of my shed, others were now up on the roof of the condo, walking along, peering down into other terraces. Their rage was palpable.

Them: “What are you doing up here?”
Me: “I live here.”
Them: “Someone hit me in the head with an egg!”
Me: “It wasn’t me, I didn’t throw anything.”
Them: “Well, we’re gonna find out who the hell it was…”

How many times can you swear you didn’t do something? How pleading can you be? When your life depends on it…a lot, it turns out!

“If anyone did throw eggs, though,” I said, a little more confidently now, “it’s probably because of the noise from the party.” I assured them that I firmly believed that throwing things was no way to solve a noise problem — certainly I would never solve it that way. You should go and speak to the people directly, obviously. That was the rational thing to do, and I had to convince them I was a rational person.

Eventually, there were around 20 (!) angry guys up there, intimidating me, looking down at me or standing next to me, others searching (for what: a crate of eggs?) from the rooftop. Somehow — I don’t know how — I managed to calm them down. In spite of myself, I spoke calmly (though perhaps the obvious fear in my voice and wide eyes helped “satisfy” them a bit). I picked out one of them, one who seemed more rational, and addressed myself to him. He asked who lived here, who my neighbours were. I assured him we weren’t the kind of people that would throw eggs, and in particular — I couldn’t stress this enough — it hadn’t been me! I also said that they couldn’t just come up here; this was private property. I said that if their party had been assaulted by eggs, the best thing to do would be to call the police to sort out the whole mess. Obviously that wasn’t something they were too interested in, and perhaps that saved me. After about five interminable minutes of “discussion,” they headed back down to the party.

One of the last guys to leave spoke to me, almost conspiratorially: “Do you really think we’re being too loud?”

Hmm. A trick question? “Well, it is pretty loud,” I said. I quickly added: “But that’s okay, you know, to have a party once in a while.”

A bit later, I noticed two big guys were still camped out on my roof, lurking there in the shadows.

“What are you doing?” I asked. They said they wanted to keep an eye out, watch for further egg-throwing. No, this would not do. They had to go. And somehow, I felt more and more confident. It hadn’t been “1 vs. 100″ but it had been close enough. And I was in the right. “This is private property,” I reiterated, waving them away. “Sorry, but you can’t sit on my roof.”

Amazingly, they climbed down and returned to their party. “We’ll be watching,” they said, ever-friendly.

“That’s great,” I said. “Have a nice night.” Then I went inside and tidied my house for a few hours, because my tiredness had been overcome by my pumping adrenal glands and testosterone; my brain was going a mile a minute. I was angry. I was relieved. I was scared. If someone did throw more eggs, would they assume it was me? Would they come back when I was asleep, with only a screen door between me and the mob? No, I wouldn’t get to sleep until 3:30am. Only now, it had nothing to do with the music.

One of my photos has been featured in a Montreal guide:

This Mr. Bean float appeared in the closing “Twin Parade” of the 2007 Just For Laughs festival. But was it really Mr. Bean, or was it actually his twin, Spanish PM José Luis Zapatero (with his oso de peluche)?

Well, I’ve done it — gone and bought Photoshop CS3. No more fiddling around with my various array of “almost good enough” tools and toys… Though it does look like I still will be using some of them (e.g. Photomatix for HDRs, Hugin for panos, maybe Bibble now and then). Those tools are all useful but I need to be able to make selections and masks, for the way I do my photo processing. (For the ear-steaming OpenSource freaks out there, GIMP runs too slowly on my iBook; when painting with a large brush it’s pathetic waiting for it to catch up…) It’s great to finally be able to say: “I’ve got the power! Dnt…dnt…dn-dn-dnt…dnt, dnt!” (now that song will be stuck in your head all day, hee hee ;-)

So here’s a shot from the football match last Sunday: