An Outlandish Journey

 Yesterday I bumped into an old friend on the bike path. I had been thinking of him just then -- we were at university together and worked on the student newspaper in 1969 during the famous Computer Centre Crisis- we both got fired for supporting the black students but more importantly he got arrested and beaten and jailed, and also expelled. Three years later I testified for him in court where he was given a suspended sentence. Ten years later I used to babysit his three-year-old son, while he joined the Maoists and became a junkie. Our paths drifted apart. In 1998 I ran into him by accident but didn't at first recognize him - I mistook him for a panhandler asking for change. Yesterday he popped into my mind as I cycled past the place I had last seen him. I wondered if he was still around or had he left town? What had become of him ? And suddenly up ahead crossing the path, there he was. A man of few words, long ago he wrote a haiku: Moccasins on Concrete I have come to avenge  Th

Yesterday I tried to go for a bike ride but the wind nearly blew me over so I rode home and sat in the garden and fell asleep in my chair like an old woman which I am. A painful memory surfaced that I wasn't prepared for : meaning I haven't really processed it or what it means. It's part of my long history of saying the wrong thing and suffering the consequences. In June of 2020 during Covid lockdowns I was having a chat with someone calling himself Mick Jagger. I was staying in a trailer park in the Canadian Rockies, with just a bicycle for transportation. The nearest town was Valemount, about 4 km away. I was often alone for the two months I spent there, as my roommate Andrew was working as a treeplanter. This was bear country- pine barrens- near the Keystone pipeline project and a railroad level crossing. It had been exactly a year since I'd emailed Mick from my seat on the Greyhound bus from Boston where I had seen the Stones perform for the second time in a week.

  Going on intuition that you might find this interesting I am of your generation (a few years younger) and remember you well from the days when all my friends were raving Beatles fans. George was my favourite Beatle and Ioved "My Sweet Lord" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Later "Layla" was my favorite song, one that sent me into an ecstatic trance whenever I heard it. I grew up in Montreal, Canada and lived near Leonard Cohen in his funky downtown neighborhood in the 1970s to mid nineties. I worked as a freelance journalist and also taught creative writing while writing poetry and fiction. In 1992 my life changed when I traveled to the Caribbean and *almost* met Mick Jagger on his island in the Grenadines.  Afterwards I began hearing from him through the internet and also  some songs in the Voodoo Lounge album that came out in 1994. I can say with relative certainty that "Love is Strong" was inspired by my visit to the "seedy bar&quo