A visit to my old apartment

J and I were visiting my old apartment, except that this apartment was completely different. We were just stopping by, en route to spending some time with a friend. She was with us, and came into the apartment to wait for us.

Once in, we found a lot of stuff that belonged to me and realized that we had to recoup anything we wanted before another tenant came along. Weirdly, I had been away from that apartment for a few years, so didn't know why there was so much of my stuff still there: clothes, food, weird knickknacks, etc...

I felt guilty because J and I were taking a while to put everything in plastic bags. Our friend waited patiently but I was acutely aware that we were being selfish and probably wasting her time.

Suddenly J ran over to me, very agitated and said, "Call an ambulance... X is sick." She was in the bathroom, vomiting blood. There was no phone in the apartment, so I ran outside and rang the neighbour's bell.

The neighbour lived in a huge apartment up a steep flight of stairs. There were many children and other people in the apartment's many rooms. I called an ambulance and went back downstairs.

While we waited, J and I continued to pile clothes into old plastic bags. I kept looking for the ambulance, and wondered why it was taking so long.

Viejos Robles, te amo

Last week we took home another bottle of Viejos Robles. It was there, it was fast and we had some foggy memory of liking it sometime in the past.

So we took home two more bottles tonight -- a menage a trois with last week's bottle and the fourth bottle from a few weeks ago looking on, voyeuristic and just a little bit jealous.

Now it's love. Los Robles, I love you, and I'm not afraid to say it, my Argentine beauty.

Let me count the ways... Los Robles, you are:

1. Dark, deep and rich
2. Full bodied (if you know what I mean...)
3. Smooth... a completely well rounded experience, from nose, to wet lip to back of the tongue
4. Full of little nuances: espresso, black cherry
5. Cheap! Only $8.50 CDN

La Pigole: Never again too good for dep wine...

Here in Montreal you can go to the corner store and buy wine.

If you're in the US, you might think this isn't such a big whoop....

But you can't buy wine outside a government-sanctioned store anywhere else in Canada. It's all part of Quebec's loose moral character: our booze is cheap and readily available... and we like sex.

And when people describe the good things about this city, inevitably one of them is "you can buy your wine at the corner store."

But then, something happens. You decide that you're too good for what we call "dep wine" (depanneur = corner store in Quebec, handyman elsewhere in the French-speaking world).

Too good for readily available, cheap, fairly decent wine? WTF?

With this now empty bottle of La Pigole from Cotes-du-Rhone (un "grand vin de France") I declare myself officially never too good for dep wine.

Tractors in the sky and bones on the ground

Part of a larger dream, I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I noticed a tractor flying at airplane height above us. To my horror, the tractor was coming closer... it was falling, straight toward us. It smashed down at a neighbouring table. Tractor pieces and body parts flew everywhere.

Apparently, a woman had been driving the tractor. Someone explained that she was a kind of courier making a delivery. Bones and body parts were scattered all over the cafe tables. I was horrified, and left. Then I noticed that people were attentively, even reverentially, cleaning up the body parts. I had a lot of respect for these people, that they could be so kind to the dead woman. So I went back to my table and attempted to do the same.