The Geography of Hope

(Please Note: Train 85 actually didn't have on-board wifi, and this post is actually being written later in the day, and the post title is really just a sham attempt to maintain some kind of structural continuity. Not that you were wondering . . .)

Anyway . . . the bulk of the GOH Whistle-Stop Tour's now over, and the sleep-deprivation's increasingly fierce, and the best I can muster at the moment is a sort of point-form highlights package.

1) Kingston, Feb 14: Well, you gotta swing and miss at least once, right? Turns out the GOH slideshow was no match for Valentine's Day, and impending Reading Week at the local university (my alma mater), and a broken-telephone thing as regards who was handling the advance publicity that was almost certainly my bad. Which is to say maybe a baker's dozen showed up, and I knew almost all of 'em. The ones I didn't know, though, were lovely people, and I had Henry Rollins' old Black Flag credo in my mind about how it didn't matter how many were in the room, you still had to rock, and so I think I acquitted myself alright.

2) Ottawa, Feb 15-16: Took a side trip to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' Sustainable Communities conference, which sounds dry as toast but actually rocked far harder than Kingston did. In addition to interviewing Adam Werbach - who careful readers of the book will note was probably the single most important influence on my initial thinking as I was conceiving the book - I hooked up with the extraordinarily gregarious and fun-loving CarbonZero crew, hit the town with a gaggle of current and former city councillors who met each other years earlier at FCM conferences when most of 'em were in their early 20s and known in some circles as the "Brat Pack," and even sold a handful of books. Plus also when I arrived on Friday, the first four or five people to see the books on display came over to say they'd already bought copies and/or were already reading the book etc., which is always nice.

3) Toronto, Feb 18: Packed the house at the Gladstone. Saw some of my oldest and dearest friends. Had at least two too many beers with the good people at Travesty Productions afterward, plotting global multimedia domination. Good times, good times.