Glenn Kubish

                             Happy end of the week, friends! This is where, once a week, I try to notice three things from my life that made me feel happy or grateful. So the outrage algorithm gets a day off. Here's Three Things podcast, Episode 47 . 1. Tail lights From Auntie Shelagh I have new, battery-operated winter gloves with three temperature settings indicated by tiny LED bars that glow red-orange. Those little dashes of light are specks of memory, too. I recall the hours that one night driving through the Rockies, aiming for Vancouver and a first job away from home, with two consolations for company: A cassette tape of Jennifer Warnes singing Leonard Cohen songs, and two tail lights ahead on the only other vehicle on the road. My little motorized auditorium, a red Nissan Micra, rolled through the dark, as I sang with all my might, my eyes trained on those holes burned through the curtain of black that...

Almost 2,100 years ago, the Lucretius wrote a book called On the Nature of Things. The scientist-poet muses on the soul, matter, physics, history, happiness, sailing, corn, existential dread, wine, the weather, the theatre, mud, the allure of tyrants in times of ordeal, love, the senses, death, compounds, dreams, fire, fallacy, flatulence, why evil happens to good people, images, the afterlife and other breezy topics of interest to Rome back in the day. And volcanoes. He writes about volcanoes, too. And fabric.  The tract is a song of praise to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who "was the first that dared to raise mortal eyes" against superstitious religion. It's a slow, timely read.  The book ends unexpectedly during an account of the plague that devastated Greece at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Some scholars suggest Lucretius died before being able to weave together the cosmos into a complete account. I kinda like how it ends. I also like the way The Sopranos ends...

It is now after midnight in Montréal. Leonard Cohen has been dead for one year. Is it ever November 7. Tomorrow, I am off to Calgary for an evening bicycle ride with friends I haven't yet met to mark the first anniversary of the poet's death This may seem a strange thing to do.  But I remember driving alone in the rain through the Rockies. It was night. I was on my way to Vancouver to start a new job. Taillights ahead comforted me. And Jennifer Warnes sang Joan of Arc from the cassette player. Into the smear of red and black I sang so loud.  I remember running down Clinton Street with Shelagh on the way to see a play and I remember how we stayed in a restaurant afterward and ate fried chicken and drank and listened to music.  There should be a plaque at the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton. Something to the effect of: From this bar Leonard Cohen was kicked out one winter night after making too much noise and without this expulsion he never would hav...

Tonight, I was one of nine Pecha Kucha presenters at the Winter Cycling Congress in Montréal. We gathered at a restaurant in Parc-La Fontaine to share our takes on riding a bicycle in this beautiful season. I talked about Leonard Cohen.   I’m Glenn from Edmonton. It’s so cool to be here. In winter. On the streets of Montreal. Dis-moi ce qui se passe dans les rues de Montréal, the great Leonard Cohen asks us.  Tell me what’s happening on the streets of Montreal. Well, Monsieur Cohen, we are riding our bicycles on the streets of Montreal. Just like you. Montreal is Leonard Cohen’s city. This is the poet when he was four, riding his tricycle on Belmont Avenue.  It’s all there already, isn’t it?  The passion. The fashion. The commitment to rhythm. When you pedal down-up, down-up, down-up enough times, that rhythm gets inside. That picture is from summer... ..but let’s claim Leonard Cohen as the poet laureate for winter bicycle riders, shall we...

Mérida, December 10, 2016 Oh, so long, Marianne It's time that we began To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it All again. Sitting in Santa Lucia park in Mérida last night I heard that chorus again, and it hit me new. Maybe it was being in Mérida for the first time, or at Noche Blanca, or, maybe, it was the novelty of +24 on December 10 with a beguiling espresso-mezcal potion in the books. But the passageways were open. For smells and sounds and sights and breezes—and poetry. The Cohen tribute was offered by three players on bass, keyboard, and drums, joined by a kind of beatnik cantor. An enormous tree dripped its leaves over the stage. They sang Marianne. Maybe the bittersweet rhythm of life (farewell and starting over) came through more clearly on that, the last evening of our holiday in a foreign country. I saw some things that I will try to use to make my life better when I re-attach myself to the machinery of the clock back home. There's the rhythm: a s...