13 January, 2005 - 11:11

I am getting so lost in Brian Eno�s song, By this River. Last weekend, I met up with my favourite - and only - Argentine friend to go to a showing of Y tu mama tambien and for the first time I could understand all of the film. The first time I saw it was in Japan, having to squint through the Japanese subtitles for Kanji I could read and listen through the Spanish to pick out words that sounded like French. Despite it all, I actually really enjoyed the film that time. But this time was like a bombshell.

Oh, the narrative!

It�s what makes the film � a meandering voice during non-dialogue moments, explaining the reason for the painted cross on the rock as the three main characters drive by or why he lights matches in his best friend�s toilet after he uses it or what happens to the old lady that sells homemade dolls. But the most important things about the story are not included in the narrative and were included as vague visual intimations.

I think that road-trip films are such a beautiful allegory. Every time I end up traveling on the road I feel infinite lightness, a predilection to eschewing the use of logical problem-solving and the thrill of joyriding a steep learning curve. Things just make more sense nomadically. Perhaps that�s the reason why I have spent and am spending two years outside of Canada in Japan and now six months in Malawi � that there is something so important about going places.

I remember once my mother told me a story about their friend in the 1960s who had incredibly rich parents and he was given a year-long, around-the-world plane ticket for his birthday. So he went everywhere and he doesn�t remember any of it because he was so high the entire year that there are no memories for his travels.

How dreadful. My fuel for life is remembering: the noisy hostel in New Orleans with Katrina, the weird purple liqueur that Jeannie and I drank every morning, my face on small-town Japanese cable TV, pushing our broken-down car through Maputo and making a small village-worth of drunken friends, eating termites for the first time and on and on�

Without those things I�m pretty blank and, admittedly, there is a lot that I don�t remember. I guess that�s my goal � to somehow work on memory as a means to happiness.