In Palinode's Palace

took me up to the invitation, which was offered over a plate of horrendously hot hot wings.

Even though I'd agreed to come to Lindsay's party, I was a bit skeptical. As far as I knew, Lindsay had one friend other than me, and this guy was not exactly the most entertaining company.

His name was Doug. He had a sculpted shell of dark hair and aviator glasses perched permanently on his nose. He was jowly and stocky, with a ridiculously fine nose and tiny mouth that indented the centre of his face.

He had the look of someone with a garage full of army rations and rifles under a tarp. Lindsay had been particularly enthusiastic about setting up coffee between the three of us. He had described Doug as a "brilliant schizophrenic" with tremendous insights into the treatment of mental health.

He had wowed a group of doctor in California, Lindsay told me, shaking his head to emphasize the degree of wowing Doug had worked.

At coffee I tried to elicit some of the insights that Lindsay had promised, but Doug preferred to talk about highways. Doug spent his summers hitchhiking around the States, and he could describe each stretch of road he'd traveled, its junctions and signs, the condition of each road and every stretch of repair work he'd encountered.

Worse, he would describe every road in the same fashion, starting with route number, major service points, road conditions and friendliness to hitchhikers. I made the mistake of trying to keep the roads straight in my head, but Doug's autistic recall overwhelmed my short-term memory. I figured that the trick was to block out the highway bits and catch the bits of story sandwiched in between, but after half an hour I understood that there was nothing between the roads.

One road merged with another, branched off to a side route, came round to the trunk artery again. I pictured the world in Doug's mind, an endless tangle of bridges and underpasses, service roads and rights-of-way, with all the cities no more than a few fast food huts and outlet malls clustered around the exits. My god, Lindsay said after Doug had left, that man is brilliant.

A bit fixed on highways, but brilliant.

(Doug's brain)

Who else is coming to the party? I asked Lindsay.

Well, he said, there's Doug. He liked you.

I showed up anyway.

That's all for today, folks. I'm still under the weather, and this one needs a degree of concentration that my spacy brain won't permit. The rest forthcoming, as soon as the Feather Duster of Health clears away the Cobwebs of Sick.

Lucky for me, I live in Canada, so my Feather Duster is free. But I have to wait six months for it.

That Schmutzie, she sure is married to me.


In the summer of 1993, having decided at twenty-two that my adulthood was at hand, I dropped out of university and moved to another city. I had never held a real job, never paid rent or bills, never bought groceries.

My parents certainly didn't spoil me, but they were so tolerant of my habits that ultimately I had run out of patience with myself. I announced my plan to move out the day before my birthday, when, in a burst of irritation, I answered a casual question with the answer: "I'm moving out. Chocolate".

The question had been: What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?

My mother, who had been gently pushing me out the door ever since I had turned eighteen, asked me what I planned to do if I couldn't find a job. I thought for less than a second, actually shrugged.

"Go on welfare," I offered.

"Oh, don't say that, Aidan," she pleaded. Having never had to pay for my own food, I thought my mother's anxiety was funny.

I had yet to be broke and jobless, credit card maxed and bank account drained, sitting around in a tilting building and living on cigarettes. That came a few years later. In the meantime, I hated the city I lived in and the university I was attending, and I wanted nothing more than to run, as fast as I could, no plans or contacts of worth, in order to hit escape velocity.

For some reason I chose Calgary. It was big and anonymous enough for my purposes, six hundred kilometres away, with a few friends to stave off loneliness. It was also just close enough to home that I could afford the bus ticket back if things got really bad.

Without a plan in mind, I decided to guide myself by the Principle of Yes. Whatever came along, I decided, I would not refuse it. I would at least give it a fair chance.

The universe would reveal its intentions to me if I said Yes to everything.

I discovered very quickly that the universe's intentions are not equal. For a comfortable divorcee looking into Caribbean vacation packages, the universe may intend a renewal of love and life.

If you're a young man who takes a minimum-wage job and moves into a slummy building in a dodgy neighbourhood, the universe will take your measure and try and degrade you further. The Principle of Yes landed me in a Bible study group with a bunch of fundamentalist wackos for a while. It had me sitting in a roomful of pale-faced losers, all hanging on the words of network marketers in expensive but poorly tailored suits.

It had me listening patiently to the entreaties of middle-aged men who had spotted me leaving the hostel and wanted to help me out with "rent, school, anything you need". Had I done the universe's bidding, I would have ended up a Bible-thumping rent boy who could sell you cleaning products on the side. Oh, and I'd be paying two hundred dollars a month for a crappy video dating service, but that's another story.

In truth, my guiding star was more the Principle of Let's Not Say No Just Yet. Until I met Lindsay, who invited me to the most terrifying and bizarre party of my life. Then it became the Principle of Get Me the Fuck Out of Here.

I met Lindsay at the Kathmandu Uptown Caf e , a coffee shop that was no doubt meant to cater to an affluent crowd, but had been doomed by location to become a hangout for alcoholics, the mentally ill and the terminally unemployed. Lindsay was all three of these things. Years of drinking and poverty had reduced his hair and face seemed to the same ash grey and limp texture.

He had been a newspaper journalist and photographer of no small talent, but alcoholism and an inability to tolerate the increasingly cold and corporatist world of print media had driven him onto the streets, hard drinking and bi-polar. During lucid periods, which would last a few weeks at a time, he drank coffee and told stories of working in newsrooms across the country. He had no more than three or four teeth left in his mouth, which fact he would cover by raising his coffee cup to his mouth everytime he laughed or smiled, which was often, so by the end of any given evening he'd be wired on coffee, talking at high speed and excavating the memory of his newspaper days and his marriage to a poet who'd had some minor fame in the 1970s.

After a few months I could always spot Lindsay's manic phases, which would build slowly and usually culminate in his disappearance, then subsequent reappearance a week or so later, stinking drunk and covered in bruises. He would start wearing buttons on his jacket, talking elliptically about politicians and the Hell's Angels, interrupting his monologue every so often with a dark portentous laugh. When he was manic he didn't bother to cover his lips, which would draw back to reveal the stumps of canines.

It gave his face wolf-like appearance. Once he showed up at my apartment, knocking on the window and scuttling in when I opened the back door. He wore an oversized tweed sports jacket covered in pins and buttons.

He announced to me that "Operation Mindfuck" had begun, laughing darkly. Then he bummed a cigarette and disappeared for two weeks.

After I'd known him a few months Lindsay told me that he had a girlfriend.

I had a hard time imagining this, since Lindsay always seemed like such a wreck. It was a testament to his charisma that anyone would talk to him at all, alcohol having ravaged his face and coarsened his skin. Nonetheless, Lindsay told me all about her.

She was gorgeous, he said, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. From what I could gather, Lindsay had worked for this businessman or known him in a professional capacity at some point. He had hooked up with her during his last stay in the hospital.

She too, apparently, had her problems, which exhibited themselves in the form of repeated spontaneous suicide attempts.

I had run into Lindsay one afternoon in a sports bar at the end of Seventh Avenue, right at the downtown terminus of the LRT line. It was the in-between hour of the restaurant day, when the place is empty, the music is off and the only light comes in through the windows.

I can't remember now what either of us were doing there, but he sat down with me, talked me into ordering a plate of the hottest hot wings I think I've ever eaten (with the exception of a Jungle Jim's restaurant in rural Newfoundland, where I had to sign a waiver), and told me more about his girlfriend Sheila.

Lindsay seemed calm and personable, but every so often the portentous laugh would slip out, with that baring of fangs. He had decided that it was time for me to meet her.

She was a spitfire or a firecracker, I forget which. All I can remember is the sweat beading and running down my forehead, the room practically vibrating with all the capsicum I was eating, so by the time he invited to his place for a party that Friday, I nodded helplessly, my face the colour of boiled ham.

OMG!

Where's part two? It's .

He has a forehead that borders on the hydrocephalic, set off by eyebrows that belong to a fashion model twice his size, all narrowing down to a ridiculously pointed little chin. I haven't done justice to the eyes, which are large, clouded grey-green affairs that bulge out over the most hollow cheeks I've ever seen. The black ink has made him look a bit more affable and attractive than he really is, with a fuller goatee and thicker hair.

In truth his hair is a light mousy brown, almost feathery.

And you see where the text in the picture trails past the margin? That's the flaw that sets off the perfection of the whole.

That's what makes it art, sucka.

Sucka.

Here's something I drew one night at the bar.

A table of RCMP cadets shaking off their aggression with Guinness. Yeah, that'll work. And don't draw drunk.

His proteg e Anthony, a guy with wavy feathered hair and an air of 1970s-era insouciance, gave me some phrases for picking up girls in the Philippines. It did not faze him one bit when I told him that I was married. "So?

" he said. "Man is for woman, and woman is for man!" Then he would point at the nearest young woman.

"Look! When she walks past us, you say, 'Heeey, magandan babai'!" I thought that Anthony was twenty-five holding on to eighteen.

I found out later that he was forty, and unsurprisingly, still single.

On the third day we shifted from Manila to the Taal area in Batangas. Dindo could be a little exhausting, especially in combination with the constant humidity and heat, but so far he had been everything that other guides had not: reliable, punctual, and helpful.

When the foreign office had no idea who we were, Dindo smooth-talked them into issuing us press passes (I still have mine). When the police pulled our van over in a routine play to shake some money from us, Dindo told them that we were foreign journalists working at the behest of the government. And so on.

The lunch in our honour was being held in someone's backyard. As we pulled up, Dindo explained that there were many prominent people in attendance, and they were all expecting me. Greg and I began to feel a bit underdressed for the occasion, I in my jeans and light shirt, he in shorts and T-shirt, but Dindo waved away my anxieties.

No problem, he said, this is a traditional Easter brunch, it's not formal. And anyway, he continued, some people there will not know who you are.

It turned out that no people there knew who we were.

The brunchers were wearing what I suspected was their Sunday best: the men in pressed dark slacks and starched white , the women in floral summer dresses and hair set in loose but rigidly held curls. Dindo went from table to table, assiduously introducing us to the the mayor and his family, to various council members, and to anyone he deemed important enough to deserve an introduction. Without exception, they greeted me with polite blank smiles and gentle nods, welcoming me to the Philippines and the town of Taal.

They were friendly, gracious people who had clearly had no idea who I was or what I was doing there. No one invited us to sit down.

We sat down anyway, at the only unoccupied table.

It was set off in a corner apart from the rest of the tables, under the shelter of a dead tree with curious brick-red bark. As soon as we took our seats I could see why no one else had chosen it. The chair seats and tabletop were covered in a layer of sticky damp dirt, with a few ants and other insects crawling on the surface.

I brushed off my seat discreetly and sat down. Dindo and Anthony did the same. Greg gave me a glance that I had come to know as his "What the hell are we doing here?

" look.

The lunch itself was a buffet-style meal. The most readily identifiable items were pieces of sushi, but I had no idea how long they'd been sitting out.

I took two pieces that did not appear to contain raw fish and began to pick at random from the rest of the table. I couldn't tell what I was putting on my plate, but the entire buffet seemed to made of casseroles.

I tried a piece of sushi.

Despite the overwhelming moisture that crept into every single thing in the country, the rice was chokingly dry. I swallowed one piece and moved the other to the side of the plate. Anthony and Dindo had not eaten their sushi either, but they were tucking into the casseroles readily enough.

I tried something that seemed to be raw pink meat with a crust of corn flakes.

No good. My tongue couldn't figure out what I had just put in my mouth.

My jaw refused to move. I had to reach into a core of calm, a near-Zen state of tranquility, just to unclench my teeth and bite down again. I couldn't even interpret the taste; all I could register was the raw texture, the overripe softness of whatever it was I had agreed to eat.

I wanted to ask Dindo what it was, but he was ignoring me. He had picked up on my unease and had chosen not to talk me through it. I swallowed the food and readied myself for the next bite.

That's when I spotted the dog. It was making a thin yipping noise, somewhere between a bark and a whine, constant enough that I had effectively ceased to hear it a few minutes after arriving, but a sharp peak or break in its cry had punctuated its presence. I turned in my seat and realized that the dog was under the tree only a few feet from me, a tiny starved mutt in a wire cage so small that there was no room for the dog to move.

It had twisted its body around to bite at its own hip, which had gone bald and raw. The thing was staring at me from its cage, eyes nearly rolling back in its head, baring its teeth at me before remembering to bite at its hip again. Its body was covered in little sores.

I looked at Dindo and Anthony to see if they had noticed the dog as well, but they had gone to get another plate of food. I leaned over to Greg, who was carefully moving pieces of his food back and forth around his plate. He hadn't taken a bite.

"Do you see the dog?" I whispered.

"I hate this place," Greg replied.

Dindo and Anthony came back. "You're not having more?" Dindo asked.

"Go on and have some more". I explained that the traveling had killed our appetites, but in the interests of politeness I put a bite of something else in my mouth. Raw fish?

I honestly couldn't tell. By this point I was starting to look forward to the breakfast at our hotel, which I had been told was a local specialty: pork gristle covered in chocolate. At least there was coffee and pineapple.

Then something stung me.

It felt like a little drop of something like boiling water on my foot. I looked down and saw a bright red mark, a rapidly rising little welt of fire.

And then another. I took a closer look and realized that the ground was busy with red ants. These were probably the source of all the little spots on the poor dog.

I stamped absently on a few ants. Then I felt one bite my wrist, and then another on my upper arm, and then on the back of my neck. Shit, I thought.

The ants have crawled up the chair or the table leg. And then, sweet lord, I saw one land.

The ants were dropping on me from above.

I looked up at the overhanging branch and saw, to my complete horror, that the tree did not have the red bark that I'd thought. It was coated in a living, crawling crust of red ants.

Somehow I didn't scream "HOLY LIVING FUCK!

" and bolt. I had reached into that same calm center that had allowed me to eat the raw-meat-and-cornflake casserole, and I'd decided to have a rational conversation about it.

"Mr.

Dindo," I said, "I think we've got some ants at this table". As indeed we did; enough ants had dropped from the tree by this time that they were clearly visible, scurrying over the table and hunting down scraps of food.

"No we don't," Dindo said with a dismissive wave of his fork.

"No, Mr. Dindo," I said, "we do have ants at this table. We have ants, and they are biting me".

"No, they're not," he said, and went back to his food.

When I saw him slapping at an ant that had bitten his arm, I realized that my good relations with Dindo had reached an impasse. We had a week to go.

There are tales of foetal ducks and oven-baked steak in a washcloth (which somehow seems worse than the foetal duck), but the stories have as much to do with the horrendous circumstances surrounding the meal as they do with the quality of the food itself. Take Michael Ruhlman's tale of a meal at a restaurant run by Rocco DiSpirito, in which the chef's attempt to impress with off-the-menu cuisine goes seriously awry. Ruhlman manages to catch the quality of what makes a particular meal bad:

Seven years later, the memory of that meal remains sharp in my mind not so much because the food itself was a travesty -- everybody but a brain surgeon is allowed to have a bad day.

But really our worst meals are ultimately about sadness...

During the selection for the international component of season five, one of the researchers found information about the Taal Volcano.

Taal holds the distinction of being one of the world's smallest and nastiest volcanoes. It had killed hundreds of people in the twentieth century, periodically spewing cannonades of magma and boiling mud on the people who shared an island with the thing.

Ever hot on the trail of old stories about the long-dead, my company sent me in to investigate.

In the course of the show's run, Disasters of the Century covered around eighty stories, of which about twenty-five were international (ie, non-Canadian). Often we would pick stories based on the amount of 'disaster infrastructure' that had been built around the event - are there museums?

Historians and experts? Records that will lead us to survivors and descendants? Web sites?

And in countries with significant cultural or linguistic differences, are there guides (or as I came to think of them, showboating fixers)?

If you intend to conduct interviews in countries where the populace speaks little to no English, a good interpreter can make the difference between an enjoyable time in a foreign place and an endless nightmare of stomach-clenching anxiety and rage. My production company refused to spend money on a professional interpreter, so we usually ended hiring someone who had been recommended by one of our contacts.

These people were invariably useless, unemployable freaks who seemed to take pleasure in working against us. There was the one who smelled of old sweat and didn't show up for most of the interviews, the one who showed late for each interview and took offense when I mentioned it, the one who antagonized the interviewees, the one who dressed exclusively in leopard print, the one who kept bursting into tears every time someone brought up the topic of head injuries.

And then there was Dindo Montenegro.

Dindo was our tour guide and cultural interpreter, a flamboyant fixer who seemed to do a little bit of everything. He met us at the airport with a van and a driver, which I had expected. He was also accompanied by two smiling young men (I wish I could remember their names) whom we had apparently hired as well.

I checked the call sheet - these two weren't scheduled to show up until the next day. I was immediately on my guard; my company had held so closely to the bottom line for this trip that any unexpected expenses would tip the budget into the red. I did not want to end up broke and phoning home from some Pacific Rim country.

Not to worry, Mr. Eye-den, explained Dindo with much waving of arms, this is part of the package, it is all worked out with your office, you and your companion (the cameraman) are guests here. The two smiling men took the luggage and equipment from us, in some instances prising the cases from our surprised hands.

I discovered that Dindo's main talent was rapid smooth talk, effusive explanation and a semi-clandestine whispering that gave mundane details an inexplicable edge of excitement. As we threaded the streets of Manila at rush hour, Dindo informed us that we were to be guests of honour at a luncheon three days hence.

Part two tomorrow.

Sorry to break up the story like this, but I blame . I also blame NaBloPoMo for global warming and the decline in quality of moving picture entertainments.


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