6.18.01

Just back from Vancouver, been sick as a dog but too in love with the city to pay much attention to how the illness surged before finally improving today, which wasn't soon enough and now the doctor has put me on different antibiotics than I was on two days ago. And two days ago as we walked along the water—an endless shoreline—she said that the Ph.D. she's getting she's getting partly because she loves Vancouver and other cosmopolitan cities, and the specialization will buy her residence cards. Hm. With that we walked into the night of vertical lights and a city is not really a city unless it owns its height with breadth. And long about midnight I peeked from a tenth floor window across edificial density opaque with electricity and humming into a memory of three years, four years, five years. It reminded me of Asia and I see why Asians are coming. Hong Kong the topography very much resembles, but without the mess. And what is annoying about both Asian and British cultures—Asian conservative affect, British colonial stuffiness—is tempered by North American sloppiness, a kind of low-key garishness, which is amusing and somehow just. Like most other cosmopolitan cities in the world, fashion is too important and no one gives that importance a second thought. It's a little sleazy in that way, like LA. I like the sleaziness, how easy it is to disappear in it. But that is all just freak show you only pay to see once. If I lived there I would tire of that aspect quickly. Otherwise all I can think about is the miles of shoreline I haven't biked along and how I want to go back for it.

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