It didn’t rain the weekend I spent in Lyon, though it had all the trappings of it – grey, chilled, and wet cold air. The sun set early enough for me to see it was truly Fall, which I hadn’t noticed much before, having been so burnt out by overtime and work. October is a break month for me. It’s the month where all that overtime and stress comes to an abrupt end and suddenly my workload goes down from 12 hours days to 2. I’m dazed for the first few weeks of October, busy trying to remember what I was interested in before the overtime season hit and how my life isn’t actually all about work and spreadsheets.
Abe’s The Kangaroo Notebook was a good match to the fizzled, numb feeling of early October.
It has a surreal, Kafka-light feel to it and Abe will casually introduce child demons, a vampire award, and a radish-growing medical predicament without ever explaining why. Much like the nameless protagonist, I trekked around Lyon by going from one scene to another, without really knowing where I’d end up. I took breaks between museums and endless, hour long walks to stop and read my tattered used copy – by the river, on a park bench, or draped over the weird futuristic hotel chair at night. I walked for three days straight, until my heel bled and I took breaks just long enough to stretch out my legs and get my bearings. It made me wish for the telekinetically controlled hospital bed that the protagonist rode on – or, at the very least, that I should have downloaded the app for the electronic scooters around town.
Though for a city that is mostly stairs and tight passageways, I’m not sure how well something wheeled would have helped anyways.
My trip was spent in episodes, laid out like the book in small micro-worlds inside a large city. There was,
– The modern Movie Prop & Miniature Museum tucked into the Renaissance section of the old city, where I opened a side room and was suddenly face to face with the ten-foot tall alien from Alien, chains and all. And me thinking, this is a city that once killed protestants and endless others for demon worship, but now tucked into one of their old buildings is an alien queen that I paid money to see. While outside the church bells rang and people ate ice cream despite the cold.
– A group of military police pooling out of a van at the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, only for them to wait outside while one of their lot went into the church store and came out beaming with a souvenir bag and her gun slung over her shoulder.
– Me, accidently unlighting somebody else’s prayer candle in the church while trying to light my own. I paid ten cents instead of the required 2 euro though – I thought, sort of rude, why should God care about the difference between a dime and two dollars, when humans invented currency.
– Having to wait for a group of schoolchildren to finish their gym class run in the park, then getting startled by the screaming of monkeys. Only to looks over and see there was a zoo with giraffes, flamingos, and a stray black cat.
– Going to the modern art museum that only featured women artists and realizing that I’d never seen that done before, despite all the museums I’d been to. And then, when confronted by a hallway lit by red glowing light, thinking, man, women sure love scary shit in art.
– My inability to match the restaurant hours of French culture and starving at five pm by the river while searching for the first restaurant I could find that was both open and had seats available. Then, eventually giving up and buying a Euro sandwich from a convenience store to hold me over until eight. I ate it in the middle of the park between an Antivax gathering and a dog group meetup. Surprisingly, the antivax idiots caused less of a problem for me despite their shouting, as it was a dog that came up and took half my sandwich from me while I took a break from eating it to read. It was all for the best. The sandwich was bad. Probably, it was a sin to eat a cheap meal in a city known for cuisine, but when you’re starving you don’t really care.
I realize now, I felt guiltier about buying a cheap meal in France than skimping the church on a tithing.
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