the underbelly of Banff

I ran into more Amazing Race people today. I saw the hot guy and his friend running down Bear Ave. As they ran by me in a group of about 10 people, all wearing these yellow tied on Amazing Race signs, he yelled "Fucking Franki!" and tried to high five me. I can't believe he recognized me, though I guess I'm the only one in town with a pink down jacket.

This caused R, from the other evening, who was walking down the other side of the street, to run over to me. We ended up having tea at Starbucks. R suffers from arthritis, and was taking some kind of meds that made his pupils really small. He blew off his volunteer shift so we could go drinking, and I imagine it would have been something more potent had I not warned him I had a client telecon to attend to in a few hours.

I had a fun time listening to his stories of eating hash in Morocco (he said you know the buzz is kicking in when you hear the wind in your ears) and traveling through Africa with a guy from the French Foreign Legion. Between the two of us we managed to remember, in Latin, the first three paragraphs of Caesar's Gallic wars, the first 10 lines of the Iliad, and, in a total latin geek moment, we recited our favorite silly Latin poems (mine "Latin is a language, dead as dead can be / first it killed the Romans, now it's killing me").

The two interesting travel tips I learned from R are the following:

-if you are in an explosion open your mouth so that your ears won't get blown to bits; in addition, if you pull into a village and see all the kids standing around with their mouths open run away quickly because something is about to get blown up
-to find out the status of a country, change some money every day because the money changers really know what's going on - once in Algeria R was changing money and the guy offered 10 times the going rate if R would give him american dollars instead of whatever the french currency was at the time - a day later there was a coup - he said the CIA should have figured this out years ago, but hasn't

I started the day off at 630 am because I went to a publishers' workshop. I didn't learn a whole lot but did get inspired to put together a pitch for my next book which will likely be published way before my first book (or, not published at all, but I can dream can't I). The talk of the festival, which kept getting mentioned in the workshop, is some woman who got on the Oprah show. I sat in on her lecture yesterday. It's funny because to her face everyone says how great it all is. Then when she's gone they talk about how bad her lecture was (I agree), how she just used other people's material to write the book (just bought the book so can't say if that's true or not), and how she isn't that good of a writer so why did Oprah pick her. It's funny how two faced most people are here about stuff like that.

It's true especially of the women. There is a woman here who wrote a book about her husband dying; she ended up marrying his best friend. Packs of women were standing around talking about the book, and personal details about this woman's life, basically shredding her.

As the recycling nazi today I guess they felt comfortable saying these things around me. I mean, who would worry about talking in front of someone wearing a big green apron yelling "that doesn't go in there! it goes HERE!" as people try to throw their trash away. I had one little dude cower and scamper off with his trash rather than deal with me (this is 6 hours into my shift as a recycling ambassador, after only 5 hours of sleep, I was perhaps being a cranky bitch). This pack of old dudes, who I swear are stalking me, kept showing up with cups and asking "where would you like this to go, your highness?" even though they knew damn well where to put their coffee cups. I yelled at Jim Donini for trying to put a cup made of potato starch into the plastic recycling bin when it was supposed to go into the organic recycling bin. I ended the shift with my apron tied around my neck like a super hero cape, mostly because I was fucking bored, and also to shake the interest of a Banff Centre worker who, after hanging out with me for an hour, told me she thought I was "so juicy" and proceeded to ask me a question that isn't fit for this blog. The answer to the question was "NO!"

That woman was replaced with a woman named Betty that I worked with yesterday. We talked about cruisers and our obsession with walking. She told me the most interesting factoid about Banff. Apparently no one ever gets murdered here, except for once a few years ago. The police ended up going door to door to canvass the neighborhood (something they would do in my 'hood if they gave a shit). They discovered that 40% (Betty's number) of the people living in Banff were on the lam from the law! Great place to hide, I will admit. Of the people on the lam most were murderers from, according to Betty, Ontario. She told me to stop walking in town by myself at night. She should have come to visit me in Baltimore to experience what it's really like to live in a city of murderers.

I worked part of the morning with a kid named Sam who is from Australia. He wasn't good as a recycling ambassador (he couldn't keep the bins straight and showed up late; he kept telling people "I'm tired, so please take your trash somewhere else") but he was entertaining to talk to. My favorite thing he did was shake out his long dreds and then put on his hair band, right at the busiest recycling time, blocking people from throwing their trash away. I was like "dude, move!" and he just smiled at me and said "must look pretty before all things!" He tried to talk me into ditching my ambassador role at 1030 to go have a beer with him but I declined.

I should also mention, on the subject of guys, I finally had an encounter with the wine guy. I was walking down the street last night around 930 after a perfectly boring slide show, looking for food, when I saw him coming the other way. First of all, he was wearing these weird shoes and socks. And also wearing these shiny black pants that looked like basketball shorts but way longer. Ugh. And if that isn't bad enough, a green and black flannel shirt, but not cool flannel, just a shirt with one box of black next to one box of green, ad naseum. It was hideous. I tried to make small talk with him while not getting blinded by the street lights shining off his pants, especially after he mentioned having an entire case of cab that needed to be eradicated by Monday, but I couldn't get past the shoes. I mean, if I went to drink wine with him, at some point he would probably want to get comfortable and take his shoes off, then I would have to look at them in all their unsightly glory, and would surely lose my buzz.

I rounded the day out with a walk to Lake Vermilion. I'm supposed to go to Bruno's this evening because it's open mike night or something and Sam is going to be playing his diggery doo. Not sure I'll make it though. It's so warm in my room, I have writing to do, and it's cold outside.

A closing thought - at Topher Donahue's slide show last night he was talking about a parent-child relationship evolving to "dad as buddy" through climbing. Funny that I've been thinking about that a lot as it perfectly describes the relationship I have with my dad. He's a great buddy, totally reliable, enthusiastic about having adventures together, and someone I will never mind doing a 24 hour hike with or getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning to hang out with.

And I'm not just saying that because it's almost Christmas :D