L6: Friends at home

Hi,

In five days I’ll go to Athens, Greece, to meet up with Hanna, who I met at PAF in November.

I just added a few recipients to this series of letters. This is L6, the 6th one. I’ll only spam you this once. If you would like to use the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email, feel free. If you don’t do that, you will receive L7, and L8, and so on.

I’ll back up for a second. I’ve been traveling for 17 months, ever since I received an arts grant from the Canadian government large enough to allow me to quit my job and leave my apartment. Since then I spent:
- 2 months in France
- 3 months in Toronto
- 6 months in New York
- 2 months in Toronto
- 1 month in London
- 2 months in France, and
- 1 month in Toronto.
In this time I worked on my commission, a short novel, and spent the money of taxpayers and banks, and, when my funds ran low, I started writing profiles of American entrepreneurs for an editor in South Africa.

The job I quit at the end of July 2018 was at a college in Toronto called George Brown College. I taught adults how to write about their lives. I did that for three years. I also tutored high school students in math and science and English and wrote a lot of things in a lot of different mediums, sometimes for money. I also worked in a restaurant and at a circus. Before that I lived in Alabama for four years doing an MFA.

Now you know the entire history of my decade. I’m 37.

Anyway, it’s now Jan 7, 2020. I’ve been in Canada since Dec 18, when I sent L5, the fifth letter in this series.

What has happened since L5? I left PAF, the art castle in northeastern France. I left with Hanna. We spent a day and a night in Paris. Hanna showed me around. She showed me the canals, the “sluices.” I learned that Paris is a canal city, like Chicago, I had not thought of as a canal city, but which is one. We saw a large Algerian demonstration, had lunch at a vegan place called Restaurant Le Myrha, and learned that in Greek mythology, Myrrha was a mortal woman who transformed into a tree. We walked along a route that Hanna, when she lived in Paris a few years ago, used to walk from her apartment to meet her friends. Then Hanna flew to Oslo and I flew to London. In London I spent an evening there with my friend Tim, previously mentioned, works for Google, at what I guess is one of the most cutting-edge AI research facilities in the world, called DeepMind. Tim and I had dinner and I slept in the room I had slept in for six weeks in Sept/Oct, and then I flew out of Gatwick, to Toronto.

I have since been in Canada, seeing people I have known for long periods of time.

Here is who I have seen. (You can skip this paragraph if you are not interested in reading names of people I know in Canada. The main theme is me subjecting people to mediocre vegan restaurants.) On my first day in Toronto I saw my friends Cian and Jenn and their baby named Llewellyn who turned one year old about a week ago. Llewellyn, that day, had for the first time slid a little knob along a track designed to convey that knob, and this was celebrated. Afterwards Cian and I went for a beer at the Mugshot Tavern and Cian told me about his work and I displayed my existential crisis re fiction. I crashed at my friend Alex Napier’s place that night; we watched an ep of Shrill; I was super jet-lagged and went to sleep early. Over the next five days, I stayed at an AirBnB on Parkside Drive and went to a holiday party at Guillaume’s girlfriend Veronica’s place in midtown; popped my head into my old friend Alison Burns’ 40th birthday party; had a vegan brunch with Tali and Hadar at Hogtown Vegan, club sandwich was good; saw Nelia at an unassuming Vietnamese place called Phoenix, talked about whether she as an entrepreneur was a “creative” (unclear) and whether I as a writer am a “creative” (also unclear); Sarah, at sukhoTHAI, who had just seen CATS and was freaking out about it; Brad, at Pamenar, who had recently consoled me that he’d been jealous of my globetrotting when I said I was getting tired of being rootless; and went to a Hanukkah thing at Tali’s and saw Hadar and a few people I knew less well, of whom had a baby. The mom asked if there were holiday parties, she “wasn’t getting invited to any,” and then someone else said everyone was having babies and she was being left out of that! Then I went to Kingston, saw my parents, saw some of their friends. My Toronto friend Kate who’s also from Kingston came by on the 24th, with Alison Burns, and on the 25th I saw my aunt Mary, cousins Andy & his wife Karolina and kids Aidan and Nadia, Jean and her husband Andy and kids Sarah and Julia. I saw Cian and Jenn and Llewellyn at Cian’s parents’ house with Mimi and Tim, where I found a puck on the beach that I have since been carrying with me in the pocket of my PAF jacket. I picked Tim up from the house of his sister Kate, who I hadn’t seen in 19 years and whom I hugged twice. I went to the Toucan, a classic Kingston bar, and saw Tim and Laura Kelly, who updated me on our old friend Derek, and saw Max and Mimi for a second. On the day I left I ‘interviewed’ my parents about my sister for three hours, recording the conversation, and then I went back to Toronto and had dinner with Guillaume and Sennah and her filmmaker boyfriend Adrian. I worked on Miss Misery stuff for two days with Jade and applied to three or four film festivals that show web series. I stayed in on NYE and watched When Harry Met Sally, and then, when I couldn’t sleep, Uncut Gems. Over the following few days I saw Alex again, at Northwood; Darrah, at Buddha Vegan, who moved back to Toronto four months ago after something like seven years in Ottawa working a government job; Anuja, at a bar in Yorkville, who told me what having kids is like and who is being writer-mentored by Farzana Doctor; and, at Wallflower, my old friend Heidi Gordon from high school who I hadn’t seen in 19 years and my phone had died and she said “How could you let your phone die? I could’ve been a murderer!” but I didn’t think Heidi Gordon would be a murderer so I wasn’t worried about that.

Now I have less than a week left in Toronto. I will see a few more people I haven’t seen, and a few I’ve already seen, and I’ll have a couple meetings, and then I’ll be gone. I had been staying at Guillaume’s place for several days; I stayed at Brad’s place last night; I’ll stay at my friends Laura and Will’s place tonight. Today I was thinking, it’s nice to see old friends, and I’ve had a nice time in Toronto and Kingston. But if I lived here I would see many of these people at most a few times a year, and so it’s not the worst thing not to live here, though it is nice to see them all.

So. On Sunday I’ll see a Hannah Moscovitch play with my parents in Toronto, and about 5 hours after the play ends I’ll get on a plane bound for Athens and barring mechanical failure or human error I will arrive at the airport they abbreviate as ATH where I will see Hanna.

Talk soon

Steve