Dispatch from St John

If you transplanted Butte, Montana to Atlantic Canada, you'd have St. John. Bunch of gorgeous brick buildings from the late 1800s with not enough people to live in them. By day I biked around the oil refinery, taking scary pictures of smokestacks and drydocks. By night I lurked around the docks in flannel and jeans smoking Player's brand sailor's-cut cigarettes. In between doing things like that, I sell books over the internet.

The port is about the only thing lively here. Yesterday a containership called from the Caribbean, unloaded, and left. Big tankers load up at the refinery and head south to Boston. How do I know? Because I see the same damn ones when I bike around Boston. Nothing escapes me. Going to go biking if it's not raining too hard.