Out Of The Tube And Into The Lights.

SongsFromOutside
ARoomVille


As previously noted, last Sunday I climbed back into the damnable cigar tube again.

This time it was one of those big, old and creaky second-hand post-MulroneySchreiber buses, an A-330, to Montreal.

The trip involved helping out a health charity that does a really good job of keeping its overhead low.

So much so that I was happy to pay the six extra bucks to buy the local Compass card equivalent, pictured above, to save the cab fare by taking the 747 city bus from Dorval/Trudeau Airport downtown.

Taking that bus is something I actually like to do because it's scenic and, unlike everywhere I else I go in that town, folks don't immediately switch over to English when they hear me croak out, as my kids used to say, 'Good Juice!', by way of greeting.

Anyway, this trip involved sitting in a hotel dungeon room with fifteen fellow science geeks for two days so that we could rank the grant applications of others after we first bashed each other over the head arguing about the best way to analyze single cell RNA sequencing data and/or design an adoptive transfer experiment to rigorously test the latest potential immunotherapeutic drug combination pre-clinically.

On the night off between the daytime dungeon bashing I took the advice of reader Danneau (that he hadn't even sent my way yet) and headed off with some of the younger kids*, first to a bistro in the Plateau followed by a visit to a bar called Else's. The latter is one of those rare places that is filled to bursting with patrons of all ages that somehow still retains the aura of the hipster about it. In point of fact, it kind of reminded me of a now-defunct place in another Eastern(ish) city that my brother, the real musician in the family, and his friends built back in the days before Queen St. West gentrified.  

Anyway, after stumbling out of Else's we decided to walk along the edge of the park down into the campus that the slaveholding fur trader founded, all the while skirting the edge of that hill the locals call a mountain, until we came out on Sherbrooke and headed west to the Museum of Fine Arts before turning left...

And, suddenly, there he was, bigger than life and/or any of the lights...

Imagine that!


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*More and more often these days I consider anybody, including our bass player, under the age of fifty to be a kid...

And who the heckfire knew that the lunatic David Crosby, in between being just fired from the Byrds' and just before making it big with Stills and that guy from the Hollies, was the first, and ultimately doomed, producer of Cohen's 'Songs from a Room'...I mean, darn it all anyway...It's always my intention to write these little slice-of-geek-life posts with the sole intention of not diving deep down into yet another set of obsession-dug wormholes, and....well...you know...

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