The #19 bus journey serves up the same sights and sounds every day. There's a rustle of bad commuter papers that make up for their total lack of news merit with brevity. Commuters send cold glares at each other or quickly avert their eyes from elderly people looking for reassuring conversations, or pipeheads looking for someone to bark at for awhile. Shoulder to shoulder we bounce off each other as the bad transmission of the cheap eco friendly electric bus lurches through every intersection switch. There’s a tinny symphony of cranked MP3s in the air this morning; dull thudding bass and overwrought shrieks from miscellaneous pop divas.
I’m disgorged into the street, into the cold snap of too-early-in-the-morning air. It’s lightly scented with financial district musk: expensive cologne, perfume, Italian coffee, baked goods, diesel exhaust, and the greasy funk of bike courier body odour. One Quebecois courier waits at an intersection pounding on the hood of a car that’s nearly killed her, cursing its terrified carpoolers in thickly accented English. She flips them off, winks at me and takes off a fraction of a second after the light changes.
Two terrifying things await me at my desk. One, an advisory that something called “Scary Bingo” is going to begin circulating to assist in ramming this month’s enforced fun agenda down our throats. I’m afraid to ask what Scary Bingo is. Certainly the dauber stained people standing outside Planet Bingo in my neighborhood are certainly scary enough some days, but I don’t think this is what’s meant.
Scary thing number two is a Happy Halloween card that’s been sent to us by one of our low function sex offenders who’s taken to incessantly calling us. He is the world’s worst mascot. It looks like it was drawn by an eager to please six year-old. It has the same obvious determination to stay inside the lines hidden in the black and orange strokes of pencil crayon. One dimensional black bat on the front says “boo”. A bedsheet ghost next to it smiles happily.
Good morning downtown.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Sunday, October 5, 2008
That’s When I Reach For My Revolver
Friday morning the sky was full of hazy clouds slowly beginning to thicken and obscure the sun. I had a perfect vantage point to slowly watch everything turn grey. There was one last gasp of incredibly bright sunlight that washed over the building across from me. A huge reflection of gold on the obsidian black windowpanes of the financial district before the clouds closed in fully and the sky started to look like the inside of a smoker’s lung.
True Vancouver October at last. The air turns cold and the wind slowly leeches away the last of the summer heat stored in the pavement and in the building stones. The rain starts in earnest and rinses away the last lingering scents of piss and rotting garbage that haunt the alleyways all summer long. That’s the real signal for the beginning of fall. By mid-October I’ll be shivering outside in the gusty damp trying to keep a cigarette lit while the rain undoes any plans I have to stay even half dry by coming at me sideways.
Mission of Burma played a brilliant show this week. It’s a rare treat to see a band reform and not only play incredibly well, but to clearly be having a really great time while doing it. Hell of a loud set too. Roger Miller doesn’t wear the industrial headgear he used to use to combat his tinnitus anymore. I guess the last tour allowed them to spring for fancy, nearly invisible earpieces. Sadly the ringing in my own ears after the show was not sufficient to drown out the three-way hippie drum circle that broke out on the bus on the way home.
Picture a Tim Buckley circa 1970 looking tye dyed alpha male, arm slung around peasant skirt wearing earth mother with a drum clutched between her matronly thighs. Third wheel dirty sidekick in a camouflage baseball cap (what kind of self respecting hippie wears a camouflage cap anyway) cackling like a madman throughout the rhythmic frenzy. All of them proudly flying the freak flag, 40 years too late.
Perhaps they were celebrating the coming of fall, or the fact that Phish reformed, or some such thing. A common sight in Vancouver during the summer months. Watered down, fourth generation counter cultural bullshit sadly mistaking annoying all and sundry with “blowing our minds”.
The trip with them was mercifully brief, and this behavior is one that is also seen less and less once the fall rains start; I guess all the damp in the air makes hippie drum-skins too flaccid to help them freak out the squares. Welcome back October. I've missed you.
True Vancouver October at last. The air turns cold and the wind slowly leeches away the last of the summer heat stored in the pavement and in the building stones. The rain starts in earnest and rinses away the last lingering scents of piss and rotting garbage that haunt the alleyways all summer long. That’s the real signal for the beginning of fall. By mid-October I’ll be shivering outside in the gusty damp trying to keep a cigarette lit while the rain undoes any plans I have to stay even half dry by coming at me sideways.
Mission of Burma played a brilliant show this week. It’s a rare treat to see a band reform and not only play incredibly well, but to clearly be having a really great time while doing it. Hell of a loud set too. Roger Miller doesn’t wear the industrial headgear he used to use to combat his tinnitus anymore. I guess the last tour allowed them to spring for fancy, nearly invisible earpieces. Sadly the ringing in my own ears after the show was not sufficient to drown out the three-way hippie drum circle that broke out on the bus on the way home.
Picture a Tim Buckley circa 1970 looking tye dyed alpha male, arm slung around peasant skirt wearing earth mother with a drum clutched between her matronly thighs. Third wheel dirty sidekick in a camouflage baseball cap (what kind of self respecting hippie wears a camouflage cap anyway) cackling like a madman throughout the rhythmic frenzy. All of them proudly flying the freak flag, 40 years too late.
Perhaps they were celebrating the coming of fall, or the fact that Phish reformed, or some such thing. A common sight in Vancouver during the summer months. Watered down, fourth generation counter cultural bullshit sadly mistaking annoying all and sundry with “blowing our minds”.
The trip with them was mercifully brief, and this behavior is one that is also seen less and less once the fall rains start; I guess all the damp in the air makes hippie drum-skins too flaccid to help them freak out the squares. Welcome back October. I've missed you.
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