Filmstrip

I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf. Think fragments of perception strung together in a fashion that is somehow meaningful, yet at the same time indefinable and elusive as you try to turn that string into a cohesive loop, a whole. And still, inexplicably, those pieces belong together. Somehow, I cannot perceive them as apart.

Edmonton is like that. The more I look at the city, the harder I find it is to apply that single word to it. What’s in a name? For me, in this case, not much. I don’t even know where the name “Edmonton” came from, though maybe at some point during this course, I’ll look it up. I see this city in snapshots, but not ones that can be divided into frames and distanced from eachother by vast expanses of white wall. It’s more like the negatives from old film cameras: independent pictures, but joined on a single length of translucent plastic, and held up to the same light in order to discern the images.

Whyte avenue bustle on a summer afternoon – orange, pink, green, blue, yellow, red bodies push past eachother, rainbow collision that defies an order of Roy G. Biv, favouring instead the contrast, movement, blend.

First snowfall (not actually the first, we’ve all seen it before, though that doesn’t seem to change anything) – the muffled silence of a blanket pressed over fall leaves, where the tips of brown grass can still be seen, and the shouts of snowball fights are just beginning to grow.

Heritage Days, and the smell of curry mixed with spring rolls, and every spice overlaced with the faint scent of sweat – it always seems to be the hottest weekend of the year. Or maybe that’s just the way it was once, the way I remember it.

Barren underground LRT stations filled to the brim with the song of a solo musician playing an untuned guitar and singing in a dischord that harmonizes perfectly with the notes of the city itself.