Glenn Kubish

My winter bicycle is a lot of things. It's my primary mode of transportation. It's how I get exercise for cheap. It's how I have learned not to drive an automobile everywhere. My winter bike is way to save money and stress. It's a conversation starter. It's nostalgia. A way to notice things. A reliable way to feel alive. My bike is also the needle on a turntable. The way the bicycle moves along groves of ice or lanes of snow, and the way it makes a crackly sound when the tires cut into the snow and ice. That precious, scratchy sound sounds like a needle moving across a vinyl record turning around and around. My bike is a radio dial, too. I’m thinking now of the nights as a boy in the basement of the dark house when I would go from station to station and watch the glowing dial move across the grid on the face of the set. This is what I remember as my bike glides across the shadows of the elm trees on 102 Ave. When I sing a bit. ...

I am fortunate. I have a fatbike. I have a neighbourhood grocery store. I have a smartphone that dinged an incoming text request from Shelagh (who I am most fortunate to know) as she bused home from downtown while plotting the next steps in today’s Japanese chicken curry dinner. 1 1/2 pounds (680g) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, 2 onions, piece of ginger, 2 carrots, 1 celery stalk, 1 pound (455g) Yukon Gold, russet or other potatoes, 2 tetra paks (they are about 1L each) of chicken broth The dinner had started to take shape yesterday when Shelagh asked the spices to assemble. Answering the call in the aspect of an artist’s palette: pepper corns, turmeric, a bay leaf, cloves, cumin, fennel, cinnamon, brown mustard seeds, cayenne pepper, paprika, cardamom, coriander and salt. My job was to make efficient use of Shelagh’s time by going, while she travelled home, to get the rest of the ingredients. But how to go? I asked Siri for the temperature, and then consi...

I'm Glenn. That's me, too. #4. Playing hockey on the rink I grew up on in northeast Edmonton. In Canada. About 50 years ago. That rink was our universe. Out in the elements—the ice, the snow, the cold—we were pretty certain we were as great as Bobby Orr. My universe expanded when these guys showed up on TV. The Soviet Red Army hockey team. Valery Kharlamov. Aleksandr Yakushev. The coach who always smirked, Tikhnov.  And the great goaltender Vladislav Tretiak. All with the mysterious C-C-C-P on their sweaters. C-C-C-P.  I will try it: Soyuz. Sovietskikh. Socialitschekikh. Respublik. For us watching, it simply meant a new way to move on the ice. Passing, skating, working together as a team. That team was able to bring down the temperature of the game. They had a kind of chemistry. Now, C-C-C-P is Cold War history. And cold weather chemistry. I believe it now stands for calcium chloride on cycle paths. Calcium chloride, you remember from school, is a salt,...

I collect sentences. Here are four more from the forest of pages read. The trucks filed by against the background of the white church in a long string like the days of a man's life, and it seemed as though it would never end.  - Chekhov, A Misfortune The trucks filing by are rail cars moving across the Russian landscape while Ilyin begs Sofya to accept his love. Without a new sentence, Chekhov artfully links the words that describe the physical scene ( The trucks filed by against the background of the white church in a long string...)  to the words that describe the sweet, bewildering feeling of being there to watch a passing train pull a new emptiness into view ( ...the days of a man's life, and it seemed as though it would never end. ) , counting on a simple coupling word ( like ) to do its work, and hold. "It's as if the Venetian paintings were made to frighten us," said my Enishte later. "And it isn't enough that we be in awe of the...