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I am still drowning in the backlog of Montreal stuff, but I’d still like to try to keep writing new stuff for this. Backlogs were kinda not part of the original idea of this, and I’m unsure to respond to the existence of such a thing.

 

Go with the flow, like one always does. Nothing is its own original idea.

Went to Corbin’s birthday party today, after work. It would’ve been the last of my work shifts before a day off, before, but I took that PC shift so now I’m working tomorrow. At least not quite as early: 8:45.

 

I bought a wine with Corbin’s name on it—a Bordeaux, Chateau Corbin. The second I laid eyes on it, last summer when I was busy prepping the store for the Bordeaux release, when I was working as a relief PC, I thought of him. And I knew this would have to happen.

 

He lives near Oakridge, with Kirk, in a laneway house. The neighbourhood is half deconstructed, while they’re building a new mall. It’ll be the biggest in Western Canada when they’re done. Until then, so many cranes. They’ve lit them up with Christmas lights, and they glow that way through the winter overcast. We went for a walk along the sleepy avenues of the neighbourhood, where much still remained as it always had been, and we saw them towering over 41st a block away, lit up like that. Beacons of the new Vancouver.

 

Evan is in town, and he came by. He had not met Corbin, but he’d met a few other people there. He showed up an hour after he called me to say his phone was dying (I’d missed the call), and joined in the rotation of songs. What we tend to do with Corbin, is pick songs and go around in a circle playing these songs we’ve picked. I don’t do it justice talking about it—it makes for a beautiful evening to share our palettes of music as we slowly get drunker and the night gets steadily later. It’s impossible to quite put it in words: the emotional valence is so much a part of the whole experience, and that is in the air around us and in the waves of sound, and it cannot be here in black and white. I can try, but I know how far I’ll get. Life is full of those things.

 

I was glad Evan was there to mesh into that. It’s good to see him; hopefully I’ll see more of him while he’s in town—this was a relatively brief encounter in a surreal setting. I would like to catch up properly.

 

And I would’ve liked to have stayed later—but I had agreed to work tomorrow. Ah, well: for the best. It was winding down, and I was beginning to fade to sleep.

 

I should be going to bed soon.

 

P.S. Corbin requested to have his name changed to Krobin Da Knuckledragger. This is too much of a mouthful to be practical, so I’ll leave it as is—but I’m including this mention.