DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Sand dollars are black. I had no idea.

I mean the live ones, not the sterile, dead shells in the wicker basket at the gift shop. The live ones are fuzzy, too.

The shoreline near Comox is home to a colony of sand dollars. I’ve never seen anything like it: hundreds of sand dollars, strewn around the rocks. Most were dead, as far as I could tell.

We picked up a few. Frankly they’re not as nice as the sterile dead ones in the gift shop — these are stained yellow and green from seaweed. We were told these would bleach out after a few weeks in the sun. I hope so. I’ve never made a list of “100 things I want to do before I die,” but “find a whole sand dollar on the beach” would have been one of them. Seriously.

We saw tiny crabs, too. The big ones were long gone — at low tide, all the locals swarm the sandbar with nets and hip-waders. Crabs are free food. I got the sense that there is an under-employment problem in the area: jobs exist, but don’t pay too well. Our B&B hosts supplement their rental income by tending gardens and smoking salmon.

Inland from the sandbar, the beach exposed by the low tide had dried into a crust of seaweed and sand-dollar shells. It was other-worldly, a sort of smeary green that crunched underfoot. Actually it looked like a chemical spill, even though it was completely natural.

We picked our way across it, attempting to crush as little of the native fauna as possible. Every few steps, we’d hear a squirting sound and see a geyser of water erupt nearby. Our hosts explained that these are the result of Geoduck clams retracting their necks in response to the threat implied by our approach. Had we dug into the sand at the site of those eruptions, we’d have found a big clam ripe for the chowder pot. Assuming we weren’t already choking on sea-meat, three meals a day.

We missed an exit from the highway, and ended up in town. I asked the clerk at a Subway sandwich shop: “How do we get back on 19 North?”

“You mean Highway 19?”

“Yes, Highway 19, north.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t remember the name of the place. Starts with a ‘C’. Colfax, Kotex, something. But it’s north, that way [pointing north]. If you could just tell me how to get to Highway 19, that would be great.”

“Cumberland?”

“Erm, no, I don’t think so.”

“Campbell River?”

“No. Look, it’s north of Nanaimo, which is that way [pointing north], right? We have to go past that.”

“North?”

“Yes, north.”

“Or south?”

“North. The other direction from Victoria.”

“Oh, north! That way [points north].”

“Yes, thanks. Any idea where Highway 19 is?”

“Just turn right there, then take the second right.”

The moral of this story is, never ask for directions from a person who says they can’t put spinach on your sandwich “because it’s reserved for the salads.”

I don’t usually write about books I didn’t like, but I’m making an exception in this case because I was so surprised by how little I liked it. In fact, I didn’t like it a lot. I finished reading the story because I hate to leave one unfinished, but in this case I was no happier at the ending than I’d been at any point prior, except in the sense that having read the book I could be especially certain of its lack of redeeming qualities, thereby ensuring that I’d be unlikely to ever read it again. It’s a depressing story about depressing people who squander some miraculous opportunities and manage to learn not much of anything. On the last page, in the last paragraph, I at first misread a line and for a moment believed one of these losers had fallen out of a window. This would have made an abrupt and stupid ending, but not significantly more so than the alternative: they live ever after, just as unhappily as before. Serves them right, the bunch of wankers.

How To Be Good is told from the perspective of a joyless, deluded woman who is stuck in a bad marriage with a joyless, deluded husband and two snotty kids. She believes that because she’s a medical doctor she is a good person. We’re told this at least six times over the course of the woman’s extended internal monologues, which comprise about 50% of the text. This is the theme of Hornby’s book: exploring what it means to be “good.”

The woman’s husband, according to her, is a bitter and hateful man with a talent for complaining about, basically, everything. It’s a small talent but it got him a job writing a regular column for the local newspaper, in which he points out all the things around town that bother him and why.

He undergoes a spiritual awakening and a not-believable personality shift. Or, he becomes Ghandi, I’m not sure which. He quits his job, begins giving away the family’s food and money and possessions, invites a homeless person to live in the house, etc. Practically overnight he changes from a relatively typical middle-aged male, if an especially selfish and mean one, to a saint-in-training. He’s now sensitive enough to apologize for being a lousy husband — or even more telling, he stoically endures a face-to-face meeting with his wife’s lover, in a scene that is as well-written as it is ridiculously imagined. (Are uncomfortable confrontations a hallmark of Hornby’s work? I was reminded of the scene in High Fidelity where Rob is confronted by Ian/Ray in the record store. Both scenes were uncomfortable-making, but the one in High Fidelity was funny.) But for all that new intuitive and self-examinatory skill, does he at any point realize that he’s gone way off the deep end? that it’s quite lunatic to cook a meal and then suggest driving it across town to feed the homeless? that his rantings have split his family in two, alienating his son and wife, as well as turning his daughter into a faux-pious little turd? No, no, no, no, and no, respectively.

The best thing I can say about this book is that, unlike Hornby’s other two novels, it won’t be made into a movie any time soon. Or if it is, it will star William Hurt, be filmed entirely in someone’s living room, and it will suck.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon

Taken at 9:10 PM on the east coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The land in the distance is Canada. The lights at the far right are from a cruise ship returning from Alaska; they sail through this corridor daily.

My mission, upon entering Compass Books in the United terminal at SFO, was to find two current magazines: Electronic Musician, in which I expected to find an article on recording acoustic drums, and Modern Drummer, which I knew would contain a review of a cherry segment-shell drum kit from Greg Gaylord.

This bookstore stocks about 500 magazines. I scanned the titles quickly, assuming that the magazines would be grouped by topic. Scanning, scanning, scanning, stepping around the portly passenger with a carry-on the size of a Mini Cooper… and at the far end of the room, having found no cache of music magazines, I realized with a shock that musicians can’t afford to travel.

I saw magazines about golf (three of them), flying (three), food (seven), surfing (three), boating (six), cars (sixteen!), business (too many to count), woman stuff (too irritating to count). They’re topics that appeal to the sort of people who hang out in airports. Electronic musicians, apparently, are too busy sweating where next month’s supply of Ramen will come from.

And modern drummers? Well, let’s just say Drum Workshop doesn’t advertise in Forbes.

During my search, I even scanned the “Foriegn” section. Kudos to the Compass Books signage staff for labeling the section in a foriegn language. You’ve made those foriegners feel right at home.

Some of the foriegn titles would have been recognizeable as such even without a marker. Not having descended from Puritans, European magazine editors are freer with sexual imagery and implication than their counterparts in the US. I love the subtitle on this headline — “the portion control issue.” I thought one size pretty much fit all. Then again, I am descended from Puritans.