You know, I’m kinda glad our office moved and I now have to take the subway. Otherwise, I might have missed the guy who plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (no less) with a flute in each nostril.

Got a favorite freak?

Nothing ever happens on my tiny street on Tuesday, between noon and one. Nevertheless, you’re not allowed to park there, even if you’re one of those privileged citizens who, like me, have paid the 50$ a year to get a sticker allowing you to park anywhere in the neighborhood. I thought that with the enormous piles of snow that got dumped on the city this weekend, they would be more lenient about the no-parking-on-my-street-on-Tuesday-between-noon-and-one rule. I figured they wouldn’t make everyone dig out their cars and try to squeeze them all onto the neighboring streets, in the non-existing spots between other buried cars and mountains of snow.

But nooooo. I had to do just that this morning. The sad part is, nothing is going to happen on my street between noon and one today. No garbage removal, no recycling removal, no street cleaning, NO SNOW REMOVAL. We’ll just squeeze our poor cars back onto the snowbanks on my street when we come home tonight, only to restart the slip-sliding ballet of spinning wheels and snowbank squeezing on Friday, on the occasion of the equally-mysterious no-parking-on-my-street-on-Friday-between-noon-and-one dance.

We were watching the international weather this morning during breakfast, and I remarked to T that in Norway, a NORDIC country, it’s 20 degrees warmer than here right now. From the information on the weather channel, it seemed we were the coldest city in the entire free world. I used to say, “it isn’t because you’re born somewhere that you have to stay there”. So we’re thinking about opening a depanneur in Nassau, Abidjan, or Dakar.

Every other place in the world would be a thermal improvement.

(picture from Garret Wilson)

When I got my current job, I was ecstatic that I was finally working somewhere I could get to by public transportation. Avoiding aggravation of driving in the winter, saving money, getting to read more, polluting less. I’m ashamed to say that didn’t last. Where I live, Laurier station, it seems is exactly the spot on the orange line where the metro is the most packed. The doors open onto a wall of people, all looking at me like “you’re not really thinking of coming in, are you?”.

So hanging my head, I started driving again. Lightspeedcar doesn’t have a CD player, and the three tapes I have are getting repetitive. So, for about the third time in the past three years, I’ve given radio another chance.

Surfing the channels, I get crap like “la gang de malades”, “les grandes gueules” or “yé trop d’bonne heure”, where a bunch of hyperactive people talk at the same time. Anytime someone starts a sentence that piques my interest, they’re interrupted by another person and they go off on some tangent of fart-jokes and Serge Ménard parody. Then they laugh for minutes on end, and I’m left staring at the console, going “what the hell are they laughing at? I guess it’s just that I haven’t been smoking”.

Or else you get the English equivalent with Mix 96, CHOM that always plays the same old stuff, and Aaron and Tasso on Q92, whom I’ve seen enough at the movies, thank you very much. CKUT isn’t bad, but people being constantly outraged about one injustice or another, that also gets old.

In the summer of 2000, COOL FM got started. It was amazing. You never knew what you’d hear: Jay Jay Johanson one minute, followed by ska, then Bebel Gilberto, and Moby before he hit the mainstream. You could expect to be introduced to interesting, slightly marginal things. It lasted about six months, before they proudly announced their change of formula – and promptly became another CKMF. T wrote them a letter to express our disappointment, and got no reply.

I want one, only one radio station to provide me with good programming, something funny, interesting or thought-provoking. I know it’s hard for radio to compete with TV. On TV, we have access to big budget American shows written by the best writers. With radio, we have only access to the pool of local talent, and nobody can be funny or interesting for hours on end. But still, this can’t possibly be the best we can do. Some local talk shows tend to be interesting for 30 minutes on end at least.

I can’t be the only one who’s aching for this. What radio are the intelligent, original people of Montreal listening to?

So our swing school now has moved to a spiffy new location. Bigger studio, hardwood floors, conveniently located right on the really happening part of St-Denis street.

Thing is, there are windows all around the dancing area, and the place is flanked on all sides by terrrasses. So it feels more than a bit weird having people sitting and sipping beer and sangria, looking right in, while I’m in there shaking my moneymaker.

Who knows… maybe this is the swing school’s way of making some extra cash…

This week’s Friday Five questions are about home and travel. They ask, if you lived anywhere else but your hometown, where would it be? This caused me to ponder why I still live where I was born.

I grew up thinking that just because you were born somewhere, wasn’t a good enough reason to simply stay there. Doing so would be like dumbly accepting the blind luck of the draw, and admitting that you don’t really control your fate.

I finally did move to Sweden, my personal promised land, and stayed there a while. What made me return was the strangest thing.

One night, about two weeks before coming to Canada for the holidays, I was reading the online version of the Montreal Mirror. It was the issue with the results their Best of Montreal poll, and one of the categories was Best Montreal Freak. They listed the Vietnam veteran in Guy metro station, the Superman guy in NDG, the now white-haired guy in front of Ogilvy’s, and so on.

Of course, after months abroad, I hadn’t thought of those guys in ages. But I knew all of them, and nothing had ever made me feel more like a true Montrealer than that; only a Montrealer would.

When I came home for the holidays two weeks later, I had brought all my stuff. Having a cup of joe with Steph at the Second Cup on Ste-Catherine was bliss; watching Don Cherry bitch on the CBC bordered on rapture.

Home is where your personal freaks are.