Wir Fahren, Fahren, Fahren

Well, not quite yet wir don't, but very, very soon! We've been looking seriously for a used car for awhile, and found one on Kijiji that sounded pretty good: a '96 Toyota Tercel 2-door sedan. It looks like the one in this picture. The mileage on it was low, it had been undercoated almost every year, it came with summer and winter tires, and it had only had one owner, who kept all the receipts from everything that had ever been done to it. We made an appointment to check it out in Bedford on Friday afternoon, but then Alison ended up having to work. Luckily my "Uncle" Rick, who knows lots about cars, came to the rescue by driving me out to see it and test drive it with me, since I don't have a license. The poor guy had just arrived back into town from Montreal; he came straight from the airport! Thanks a million, Uncle Rick.

The car was in really good shape — no rust on the body and a lot of new parts. The only thing Rick and I could find wrong was that the brakes acted shaky. We talked to the guy selling it and he agreed to have them fixed and the car inspected at no extra cost. Seemed too good to be true, so I gave him and the woman who actually owns it a deposit. We should be able to pick it up and pay the rest in the next day or two!

It's going to make such a huge difference in our lives, having a car, that I'm getting quite excited. I've never had a driver's license, but this will be a great incentive to get it. Last night I dreamed we were on a long road trip and didn't even know where we were going, but we didn't care. It was a nice dream, and even though we were on motorcycles, I'm sure it's still a good omen. The car (haven't given it a name yet; that will have to happen soon — Marcel?) has no CD player; just a cassette deck. I'm really glad I was so skeptical about CDs when they came out, and stubbornly continued to buy tapes for the next 15 years, because I've still got a decent collection. Now it's finally revealed why I've never replaced my copy of Autobahn that Loran Davis taped for me from vinyl (b/w Tangerine Dream's Le Parc) in 1987: soundtrack for the maiden voyage!

Other items:

I went to see John Ralston Saul speak about A Fair Country at King's College on Thursday night (which was how I happened to be in Halifax on Friday to check out the car) with our friend Mimi. He was somewhat flippant and scattershot in his arguments, and it forced me to realize there are certain unscholarly similarities in his writing style that bother me. I'm rethinking the theses of the book now. I guess it didn't help that he was also quite self-aggrandizing, telling many stories that were ostensibly evidence that his book has tapped into a collective unconscious, but whose point was always that people like him and think he's quite clever. One was even about him receiving a standing ovation at a previous speaking engagement, which story may weirdly have preëmpted a standing 'o' (usually Halifax's equivalent of polite applause) at the end of this night.

The Lodge played an in-store show at CD Plus on Saturday afternoon — International Record Store Day. It was fun, but Mike and I had both come down with terrible colds, so it was also kind of hard work. Plenty of people turned out, though, and we even sold some CDs. No thanks to this guy. But maybe some thanks to these guys.

Bonus rhyming update: I've written a new song. First one in I don't even want to think how long. Might be for The Lodge, or might be for me. We'll see.

- Andrew