I’m on a trip in Vancouver. It’s super nice here. Top five nicest places I’ve ever been. There are trees everywhere. There doesn’t seem to be much of a boundary between the urban environment and the natural environment here. You can be walking downtown and suddenly find yourself on an amazing hiking trail in Stanley Park. It’s like the Homer Simpson meme where he disappears into a bush, everywhere you go.

There’s an old-growth forest outside the place I’m staying. I wake up and just go there. A nearby neighborhood, Kitsilano, has the slow-paced, academic feel of Amherst, Massachusetts. Every neighborhood I’ve visited so far has between one and five Vietnamese restaurants. There’s a lot of good coffee around town. Everyone is hot?

I’m spiraling trying to write this because I went on a hike earlier that was way more difficult than I thought it would be. I was with two guys I got connected to through our mutual friend. I’d anticipated a mellow trail with a smooth incline. It wasn’t like that. There were big rocks the entire way. Each step was a little puzzle you had to solve. I got tired quickly. The other guys were just cruising along, though?

Eventually the only thing keeping me going was my own body dysmorphia and the secret shame I felt for eating three pastries in a row the day before. “This will help burn off the pastries,” I told myself, stepping over the treacherous rocks.

I’m in Vancouver because a former supervisor-turned-friend invited me to give a research talk and visit her current lab. She’s now a professor at UBC, and some of her grad students build instrumentation to run experiments. One example is a robotic camera system that photographs tree ring samples. I used to build things not unlike that, so we’ll hang out and share ideas.

The trip had been an open invitation for a couple of years. This week worked out because my Italian employer observes a healthy August break. I’ll give the talk tomorrow, spend some time with the researchers, then enjoy the city.

A bunch of serendipitous things have happened in the last 36 hours that make it feel like the trip was the right call.

First: Air Canada went on strike just after my flight had taken off. If I’d booked anything later, I wouldn’t have made it here.

Also, during the flight, I was corresponding with a photography organization about doing a workshop, hosted by the photographer, Greg Girard. I discovered in the email thread that he lives in Vancouver, and also currently has a photo exhibition downtown. After the hike, I visited the show.

Greg Girard has been shooting street photography in Asia, especially Japan, since the ’70s. I like his photos because they make me feel unsettled, the way I feel while watching the movie Seven. I also like Japan.

This next part is only half-formed in my mind, but I’ll try to write about it anyway.

I’m drawn to Greg Girard’s photography partly because he goes to The Edge. At least that’s the name I’m giving the vague idea for now. To me, The Edge is the part of the world, and the culture, that most people don’t go to, either because it’s hard to access, or because it’s hidden in the shadows. The Edge is where weird, unsettling things happen. The frontlines of war, a shipwreck, a Diddy party, are all parts of The Edge.

I was talking about The Edge with the guy I work with, and he said something that resonated with me: exposing new areas of The Edge––apart from documenting or photographing them––is an art form. The Edge is practically a fractal. Many of its tributaries are still unidentified. Finding them is part of the artistic process.

I never went to art school, but for sure someone’s already written about this.

Anyway, the show was called Snack Sakura and very much featured The Edge. It was a series about bars in Japan that disguised themselves as “Snack” restaurants to dodge some 20th-century alcohol laws. There was a mock Sakura bar installed in the exhibition. The photos were seductive and spooky. Looking at them made me feel characteristically weird.

The night got even more Edge-coded after I asked the gallery directors for a dinner recommendation. One of them suggested a cocktail bar called Meo, in Chinatown. He brought me into the back office, pointed to a Greg Girard photo leaning against a shelf, and said, “So, actually, this is the photo that inspired the whole design of the bar.” Then he drove me there. People in Canada are super nice.

The bar had a tacky-cool ’70s theme, with plush furniture and almost everything colored purple. There were Easter eggs throughout, like secret notes printed on the napkins. The drink menu gave each drink its own full-page feature and custom graphic design. Picking one felt like choosing a character in a video game. I mostly don’t drink, so I had a Grapefruit Soda.

I don’t have a good way of ending this post. But I need to go outside now. Here are some photos of my first walk downtown, and then the art show and dinner.