No Coco, You Can Only Have Crunchies!

Mary and I went out driving and ended up in near a place called Punkeydoodles Ave.

Our trip was made in spite of the inclement weather. Nothing was going to stop us from getting to the hamlet of Shakespeare only to find "Funky Junk" was closed and that we were not going to buy anything anyway! Nothing!

We also went to Stratford where we encountered a rolly-poll cat named Shemp in the basement of a store that sold reasonably priced plates, teapots and gravy boats. The cat was worth the driving risks and the cost in gas. The owner showed us that if you you scratched the base of his tail on his back that he would make this bizarre robot head spin. He did and it was amazing! Mary got him to do it too and we laughed and I felt guilty for getting so much pleasure from the mechanical jerks of this monstrous feline.

"We drove to Stratford to scratch a cat's ass."
"why?"
"Pleasure reasons."

Stratford is cold in the cold and wintery all winter long, but the parking was fucking cheap. 40 cents an hour compared to Toronto which can get up to 6 dollars an hour. The day was kind of uneventful with the exception of getting lost in the Perth County country side during a snow-stormy day. The falling flakes weren't the cause of the danger involved in motoring about. It was the drifts that come off the barren fields. They create these weird little snow-cyclones that shoot past you and blast the side of the car. This is what makes the drive from London to Sarnia so dangerous. It's what caused the 200+ cars to be stuck over night in the snow a few months back. I once experienced driving through a storm on that highway going back to London. It was the last day I had driving my car before the insurance was canceled. It was canceled because I couldn't afford to have it resafetied after Missy had rear ended an elderly woman and smashed up the front corner panel. The trip to Sarnia that day was because Missy had a dentist appointment. I never did give that car a name. I think "Foreshadow" would have been an appropriate moniker.

Mary and I ended up driving to Guelph to enjoy some hot coffee, tea and delicious carrot cake which enjoying the view of this insane building downtown.



The coffee shop we sat in was called Planet Coffee and was quite cute. I normally have a policy of avoiding cafes with the name "Planet" in it, as the imagery feels either cheap and tacky or far too "hippy-ish" for me. I never understand why hippy-style coffee houses feel the need to display the fact that their coffee is fair-trade on everything in the cafe. If they actually gave a shit then the fact that they served fare-trade it would just be a given, like the very thought of serving questionable coffee wasn't even considered. It's like wearing a sign that says, "I don't rape young boys", it should just be the basic standard. The over promotion of fair-trade makes it quite clear that the fact that an "organic" coffee house serves it is just for the marketing value. One small sign or just simply answering the question "is this fair-trade?" with an answer of "yes." seems like more than enough.

By the way, what is non-organic coffee? Even if a coffee were to be entirely constructed using synthetic chemicals in a lab it would still be an organic substance. If it were just rocks that taste like a coffee crisp bar than maybe I would consider it fair to label it as inorganic, but even then it depends on whether or not you consider the make up of rocks and earth to be organic in nature.

I had been to Guelph two times before in my life. Once with Missy in the car with the smashed up front quarter panel that would eventually be stolen on Christmas Eve of the same year, and another time to see a student fashion show featuring my friend Terra who would be hit by a train and killed just a few weeks later while riding her bike home from summer classes she had taken in said fashion course at the same school I would eventually meet Missy in who would then come to smash up the front corner panel of my car. Charles came with me to that fashion show, his memory of the event would almost certainly be summed up with a single noise, "meh."

The drive home from Guelph with Mary was much, much shorter than I had anticipated and remembered. We passed the furniture store with the large novelty dinosaurs in the dark and without a mention of them. Unless it's visible in the day, exposed in all it's glory, it's pretty un-notable. The massive Schneider's Meats sign on the tiny stretch of 401 that separates highway 6 was however, amazing in the night sky... it let us know the time was "6:34pm" and everything!

Montreal.

I'm not actually thinking about Missy it's just a coincidence that today's post mentions her a lot. I wanted to talk about the Bonaventure Adventure today as well and it's difficult without using the "we". Fuck it I'll use "I" even though I wasn't actually by myself.

The metro stop closest to my apartment in Montreal was Vendome. I walked through these doors over 1000 times in the short time I lived in NDG.



This was always a very busy stop but once you got down into the tunnel waiting area there was a strange calm feel as you wait for sound and eventual lights of the subway to come from the previous station Villa Maria. While the Vendome metro was the stop I used most to go downtown the Villa Maria was usually the one I got out at on the way home from work when it was too cold to walk. It's also much more interesting in it's late 1960's design state...







From Vendome there were 4 stops before arriving at the 5th named Bonaventure. The first was Place St. Henri which at the time was the "hood" part of Montreal. There were French-Canadian/LA Latino Gangs complete with the Chinos and flannel plaid. "Sippin on Gin and Pepsi-cola."

The next was the transfer station of Lionel-Groulx. I used get confused at how to pronounce it and eventually, albeit wrongly settled with "Lee-onall-Gruu-lexxx". I knew how it was supposed to sound but I don't agree with silencing the letter "X". Silencing anything is always a bad idea.

If I was going to go to the movies at the Pepsi Forum than I would switch trains and get on the green line. If I needed to get downtown in a hurry to see a movie at the Paramount I would also take the green line. The green line was actually quicker than my Bonaventure Adventure but much less interesting so it was really just left to events like movies that had specific start times.

The two stops between between the transfer point and my final destination were long very french names that I'm far too lazy to look up and spell correctly. I think I only ever went to one of these stops once. They were kind of weird, bordering on completely useless and to be honest I'm not even sure where they were at ground level in the city. I think the one time I was at one of them was after a Christmas party for Hatley Clothing where Missy worked. That particular Christmas party is memorable only for the fact that to this day I still think Missy fooled around with a douchey salesman by the name of Adam who was married and also douchey. He was a douche. I don't actually care except for the fact that I'll never get the satisfaction of knowing if I was right or not. A mystery wrapped in sleaze... just like those two metro stops.

Bonaventure was a monster of a station and always reminded me of the sets from the Tim Burton Batman movie.





After traversing the stairs up another level of what I can only assume was 800 feet below the earth, I had two seemingly identical hallways. Every single time I walked through the turn-stile I would have to stop and figure out which way to go. Normally you just remember to go right or left once you pass through a door, maybe not the first few times but certainly by the 60th. Bonaventure had this way of confusing me every time. Once I did figure out the right way the real adventure would begin.

First I had to roam down an abnormally long set of hallways combined with an obscene amount of escalators:



I'd eventually pass by this small setup of businesses including a Booster Juice. I remember the Booster Juice well because it was such a bright and tacky beacon in what felt like the sub-city from the movie Metropolis. It was also where you made a left turn, walked through a few more doors and hallways and eventually came to this really narrow escalator that was almost always turned off. At the top of this incline I was finally greeted with sunlight, kind of.

This was the CN building which for some reason had a lingerie and jewelery store in it's tunnel leading into the Gare Central - train station. The train station was pretty big and had a series of rather odd carvings on the walls. There were windows way up near the ceiling which was a good 40 feet high.




I think the weirdest part about the Bonaventure underground path to the city centre was that when it passed through the train station. You literally passed though the area featuring all the gates that led to the trains. Normally a walkway passed by the entrance or another hallway leading to the station but no, you walked across the floor of the station to the other side where the paths and tunnels continued on.

At the start of this next stage there was an unusually elegant little underground market area. It had bakeries and chocolate places, a flower shop and some restaurants. It was set up as a kind of european market square but with dark subdued lighting and a low ceiling. I guess this was supposed to be the cafeteria and concessions for the train people? It was very fancy and for some reason impossible to find pictures of online. Following the curving paths through this area I was once again greeted with an escalator. This led to Place Ville-Marie (not to be confused the Villa-Maria ). This was a fancy little mall and food court under a series of businessy-business, Banks, Lawyers ect. The mall originally had one of those restaurants where you wander around and pick out you own food and it's supposedly international and you have a card punched and so on and so on. I ate there once before it closed down. It was shitty.

After this little guy, two more escalators, and another series of winding hallways I would finally get to the Eaton's Centre. This was the center mall of a collection of 5 huge connected malls and a HBC store which was easily a mall of it's own. I (we) would wander around this set for hours on weekends. If you view the series as one mall it would easily dwarf the West Edmonton. Normally the main highlight was Simon's. A hip clothing store that I (we-without me) would shop regularly at. It's a defining store in the downtown area because it's so different from most of the other department-esque style clothing stores. It was like a reasonably priced Holt Renfrew (which was just down the street). If you don't know what a Holt Renfrew is... then I just feel bad for you.













The Bonaventure Adventure was almost magical. I mean that literally. I know it was just going to the mall(s) and I almost never actually bought anything for me, but the entire trek through all the tunnels and paths to end up in these insane indoor spaces had a very surreal feeling. People who visit the city rarely get to see it in this way. They almost always go into these malls and maybe even walked through the train station, but visitors are always under a tight deadline. Most people who love shopping don't want to waste a full day downtown when they have St.Laurent and St.Denis and Mont Royal to get to. Also, I think most people don't walk through these places and see the space as an artificial world and not just a disturbing view of our love of materials. It feels like the complete opposite of looking over the open fields surrounding the are known as Punkeydoodles Avenue.

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