Picture yourself taking a long and sexy shower. Make sure it's sensual and steamy! Now think about all the different showers you've been in over your entire life. Even if you've only ever lived in the same house you whole life you've probably had showers in other places than your regular washing station. Think about all the different types of showers you've stood in before. Some probably had faucets where a stronger flow pours into a bathtub that you stand in. Others may have just a lever that streams water straight from the shower-head. There is a good chance that most of you have an solid array of showers in your history.
Now think about how the water gets from the wall to your sensual skins. Like most people you visualize a series of pipes and valves. Some will go further and imagine the hot water-tanks or even the water treatment plant that sterilizes the water before sending it on its way. No matter what process you envision it almost certainly has a very logical and human engineered mechanism that allows you to get all soapy and slick.
But how do you know that it's a series of pipes and valves? Do you remember at what age your parents or teachers explained that the water from the wall comes through tubes? I would bet that no matter how hard you try you won't be able to think back to the lesson on the basic plumbing of a shower. At some point most of us began to add up the variables and concluded that no matter what the method of travel it almost certainly did not just start spraying you by the power of magic. But how do you know? Unless you rip open the wall or were there as the bathroom was constructed you can never be certain of what lays beyond the tiled barrier.
Now picture getting out of the shower, getting dressed and getting on a bus. Imagine an older man in one of those thick beige jackets, the kind that are not quite denim and not quite nylon, sits next to you. He's a nice man and you begin to talk. at some point during the conversation he looks at you and asks the question, "on a scale of one to ten, how certain are you that the water you showered with this morning came from a series of pipes?". I would place a monetary wager that every single reader of this page would be confident in their certainty that the pipes, valves, and a heater were involved in some way. You probably wouldn't be able to describe the exact method and procedure involved but you would easily conclude with certainty that some kind of human-designed plumbing was involved. You would conclude this even though you are not 100% certain of the water's origin and could not prove to the man on the bus that this is without question. The old man accepts your certainty and get's off the bus at the next stop.
As you sit there on the imaginary bus you're probably going to begin to question why you think you're certain that the shower is not just streaming through magic. If you haven't looked inside then the possibility exists that the source could really have come from an infinite number of magical places. But you don't conclude that. Rightfully. Instead you picture in your mind the water flowing through the maze of pipes and eventually spraying you with that sweet sweet wetness.
The reason why you conclude this follows some very basic ideas and logical functions. You know that water exists on the planet. We have big bowls called oceans and lakes that we store the water in. We also know that water flows either by gravity or from pressure. You also know that the invention of the pipe exists. We've all seen them before and maybe even touched them. I have a pipe you can touch if you need. You know how heating water works and that we need to get the poop out of it before we want it soaking our face. All of the elements we need in order to get water to spray from the wall and keep us clean are known to us beyond any doubt. There is no reason to start assigning credit to invisible and illogical parts because is not necessary to add all that extra stuff in order to have a shower. Since no magic is needed and the other steps can be shown to work without it we can claim with certainty that we know where the water comes from. And I'm pretty sure that most of us do just that... with showers.
If you open your wall right now can say with 100% certainty that there is no magic to be found. That doesn't make the shower any less sensual, steamy or sexy.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Grogglin
This is just another short post in between the long pointless stories.
I don't understand those bumper-stickers I see everywhere that say "If you don't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them!" The logic of that statement is bizarre. I get the basic idiotic sentiment of it but when you brake it down it gets stupider and stupider.
These are the Canadian decals I'm talking about, the US ones are a whole other story.
The Canadian military in this day and age is humanitarian. Generally anyway. We try to get involved only in situations where we believe to be helping fellow human beings. Some situations themselves are certainly questionable, and so are some of actions involved, but whether or not you agree with things like sending our soldiers to Afghanistan, the core intentions were to help the people. At the simplest level I think it's fair to say that our military missions are not to combat an enemy but to assist the victims that enemy. This is good thing! I love the fact that we have people who are willing to risk their lives helping others, even people from the other side of the globe whom they have no connection to. Sure there are soldiers who have less honorable intentions but by and large the majority believe that their orders have the end-goal of building up a people and not bringing down an enemy. I hope that makes sense. We've never invaded a country I don't think. I could be wrong but I believe the military has always entered these conflicts after an invasion or situation has already begun.
I also think that a lot of the idiots who drive around with these stickers also believe this too, that the vast majority of work done by our military is to help out around the world.
So, the sticker suggests that if a person doesn't support the troops they should essentially be put in front of them ie. a firing squad or some type of obstacle to plow through. It's a clever catch phrase sure, but the unintended suggestion is really very insulting to our troops. By implying that people who don't support the soldiers belong at the receiving end of it's force you're essentially saying that the military is a mindless killing machine who shoots civilians who disagree with them. I doubt very much that the intention of the sticker is that if you don't stand behind our troops feel free to stand in front of them and accept their help, peacekeeping and assistance. It's clearly meant to imply that dissenters deserve violence. This is really bizarre as this mentality about the military is precisely the kind of opinion from whom the sticker is supposed to be targeting.
That seems weird to me.
Song of the day:
I don't understand those bumper-stickers I see everywhere that say "If you don't stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them!" The logic of that statement is bizarre. I get the basic idiotic sentiment of it but when you brake it down it gets stupider and stupider.
These are the Canadian decals I'm talking about, the US ones are a whole other story.
The Canadian military in this day and age is humanitarian. Generally anyway. We try to get involved only in situations where we believe to be helping fellow human beings. Some situations themselves are certainly questionable, and so are some of actions involved, but whether or not you agree with things like sending our soldiers to Afghanistan, the core intentions were to help the people. At the simplest level I think it's fair to say that our military missions are not to combat an enemy but to assist the victims that enemy. This is good thing! I love the fact that we have people who are willing to risk their lives helping others, even people from the other side of the globe whom they have no connection to. Sure there are soldiers who have less honorable intentions but by and large the majority believe that their orders have the end-goal of building up a people and not bringing down an enemy. I hope that makes sense. We've never invaded a country I don't think. I could be wrong but I believe the military has always entered these conflicts after an invasion or situation has already begun.
I also think that a lot of the idiots who drive around with these stickers also believe this too, that the vast majority of work done by our military is to help out around the world.
So, the sticker suggests that if a person doesn't support the troops they should essentially be put in front of them ie. a firing squad or some type of obstacle to plow through. It's a clever catch phrase sure, but the unintended suggestion is really very insulting to our troops. By implying that people who don't support the soldiers belong at the receiving end of it's force you're essentially saying that the military is a mindless killing machine who shoots civilians who disagree with them. I doubt very much that the intention of the sticker is that if you don't stand behind our troops feel free to stand in front of them and accept their help, peacekeeping and assistance. It's clearly meant to imply that dissenters deserve violence. This is really bizarre as this mentality about the military is precisely the kind of opinion from whom the sticker is supposed to be targeting.
That seems weird to me.
Song of the day:
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Cabbage Withdrawl
I'm in the Hamilton Public Library, third floor, looking out at the air conditioning units on the roof of the mall below. Other highlights of my scenic vista include a strip of wall along the back of Copps Coliseum that I thought held a ledge full of pigeons but is actually just spots where the paint has flaked off, and an Asian McMaster University student whose blouse I was not anticipating to see down but then caught a vivid glimpse of as I scanned the view in front of me looking for points of interest. No pun intended.
I'm downtown this afternoon because I am meeting Mary after her shift so that we can drive to Peterborough to see the band Mother Mother. I ate only salad for my lunch so that we can stop along the way and get a Hot-N-Ready and I can enjoy the sweet, melty nectar of the tiny pizza without too much guilt. I took the liberty of researching all the Little Caesar's along the 401 to find out where the closest one to an exit is. I have settled for a location in Pickering at exit number three hundred and ninety four. Mary finishes her work at four and I figure this particular spot should be coming up about an hour and twenty minutes into the drive. I don't fuck around when it comes to pizza.
I don't expect this post to go up until Sunday or Monday. It's Saturday afternoon at this moment in time though. The sky is blueish and it's sunny out. The outside temperature as of thirty minutes ago was typical of the warmish Ontario spring day you normally associate with mid March. This type of afternoon reminds me of standing out front of my high-school at lunch, chilly but enjoying the heat from the sun on the back of my neck. Charles and I are standing while the rest of the gang sit on the sidewalk. They're certain to be passed the school property line because they smoke and don't want to risk the punishment for doing so on the grounds. For months they've had to huddle in the cold in order to sooth their newly formed nicotine addiction and now they get a chance to sit back and enjoy their tobacco from the comfort of less cold weather. At the time this felt like the center of the universe and it's only until we've reached reached our early twenties do we realize this was the same at a thousand different high-schools with a million different kids.
I have to finish this walk to work in Vancouver. The last post is riddled maggoty with spelling mistakes and errors despite the fact that I went over it three times. I really should have someone edit this shit before I share it with the 4 people who skim through it to kill time in that seven minutes from :53 to :00 when their HGTV show is about to start. Income Property... fuckin' right! My plan this round is to write it all out first and then go find the pictures during the editing. Normally I just go grab them as I write because I get excited about putting in an image. After I reread the last post I was pretty happy with the visuals. There were no good photographs of a few areas that I wanted to show and I really should have included a video of the Cashman when I made the Russell Oliver reference.
Also, how awesome would a cafe called "Demon's Chocolate Experience" be?
The Medium-Long Way to Work III: Turtles in Time
Standing at the base of the Burrard bridge from the south side the view is intimidating. It's a long walk to the apex before you descend into the city's core. In the morning there were always fellow pedestrians utilizing their leggy-wegs as a form of commute. This seems like it may be a bit of a foreign concept to the Ontarians reading. What I would normally do at the base is pick out another walker that was ahead of me about three hundred meters. I would tell myself that I would be off the bridge before them no matter what. My legs would pump frantically but on most days I was able to bypass them in the final 20 meters. It was a wonderful way to boost my ego and heart rate first thing in the morning.
The Burrard bridge used to have cycling and walking on each side of the bridge. In the last couple of years they closed off a few feet of road space on the south bound side for cyclists heading to Kitsilano and created a No-Pedestrian zone on the other side so that cyclists had more space when going into downtown. There was always a few idiots who either ignored the no walking signs or were simply too dumb to notice them. This was a common theme in Vancouver that I've mentioned a lot. Idiot walkers who give street-strutters like me a bad name.
There are also a lot of stupid cyclists too and we already know my opinion on automobile operators in this city. The awful side of all three types seems to have a different motivating factor behind the moronocity. The driver's hold the view point that walkers and cyclists are not as important as them and so automatically assume all intersections as their right of way. It comes off like they feel that because walkers and bikers are not driving expensive cars, they are poor and therefore do not hold jobs that require them to rush to work.
Shitty cyclists seem to hold a somewhat more pretentious view when I would see them blow through stop signs and cut off walkers. I get the strong feeling that they feel that motorized vehicles don't deserve any of the road so the signs that direct fossil-fueled traffic don't apply to them. I've seen plenty of them cut across a street close enough to an elderly person that you can hear the swooshing sound of the air-stream flowing around the senior.
The walker's of course don't seem arrogant or pretentious, they just seem like fucking idiots, unable to decipher large visual signs every ten feet that tell them the path they're on is for bicycles.
The corner of Burrard and Pacific is the base of yet another hill to climb. There is a video store about thirty feet up on the left that has had the same movie posters since I lived there four years ago. If I'm looking to rent a film and the establishment I wish to rent from is still celebrating the release of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, then chances are their selection is going to fucking suck. This particular shithole I believe mainly stays in business with the pornography they provide.
This stretch is like many, many other retails strips in Vancouver that run along the base of a highrise apartment building. There is always at least one hair salon, a sushi or bubble tea locale, a laundry or dry cleaner's and some kind of business that sells Auto Plan, the provincial automobile insurance. Most of the time you'll also get a place to have your nails done which will feature images of that shitty art from the 80's by Patrick Nagal. You know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't need to reference it with a picture.
This was true when I lived in the cities core during the wedded years. Our building also had a Starbucks and Nestor's supermarket too which classed it up a notch. That being said there was also a Domino's pizza and walk-in clinic to help bring that class back down. I ate so many fucking pizzas from there. It was 10 feet from the door of my building. In terms of steps it required less than fifty from my sofa to the order counter.
As you approach the mid-way point up the hill there is an intersection where three of the branches come from legitimate roads while one is the exit of an alleyway. For whatever reason drivers don't use the stop sign here. Ever. The amount of times I've witnessed very close near-misses is frightening.
As you continue upward to the peak you approach Davie street. On the East side of the street is this interesting store that has a glittery tank as their signage. They seem to specialize in exotic sneakers and those small artsy toys that cost like $200 bucks. The best part about this place is the staff. Everyone working there has that Wassup Rockers, L.A. latino, skateboard thing going on. It's an odd shop and I have no clue how they have managed to stay in business. I once almost bought a pair of shoes there. I couldn't bring myself to pay $140 for sneakers I knew would dissolve in a year's time. This was way back in the marital times when I had an unusually large amount of shoes. I kind of still do.
The corner of Burrard and Davie pretty much always has a weirdo of some kind roaming around. If you turn and go west up Davie you go through the "gay" village. It's essentially just like any other neighborhood but with more rainbows. I like the Davie village area. I would sometimes walk all the way up to Denman if I had a lot of time to kill. This area is where crazy Toby lived. Just to recap who that is, Toby was a man in his 70's that I worked with when I was finishing Cabinets and furniture. We would take the long bus rides together and he would tell me conspiracies about alien reptile people who control the world. If there was a conspiracy he believed it. He was at one point a lumberjack who lived up near the yukon and had some of the best stories ever. He would also do 18 pull-ups every morning. That's 17 more than I can do and he was 73. He weighed probably 110 pounds and was Swedish with a strong accent and always wore a baseball cap. He was also an inventor who had created some kind of braking system for roller-blades as well as an amazing snowshoe. He showed me images of the snowshoe once and I was blown away at how non-crazy it actually was. He's the type of person who stays in your memory forever with vivid clarity. I actually found a photograph of him online. It was from an article about his roller-blade brakes. Every other link with his name in google led me to some weirdo conspiracy site. Man, was he weird but amazing... even by my standards.
The Davie village also has the only Denny's I ever ate at. It was gross. The end.
Normally I would continue up Burrard passing the hospital, several junkies and some homeless people. I would normally cross over to the East side of the street so that I could walk by the Wall center. I liked the fountains and the overall landscaping of the open ares between the hotel and building. This eventually ended at Nelson. I used to catch my bus on Nelson about ten yards east of Burrard. The bus stop is no longer there which seems kind of fitting for some reason. I spent so many black, pre-dawn, early mornings standing there with my Tim Horton's french vanilla in hand. I can still visualize the blue and green mosaic tile work on the building across the street. It doesn't even feel like that was even a real period of time in my life. I'm like a real life version of that awful show Sliders. Every few years my existence enters a parallel dimension that looks nothing like the last.
Sometimes I would walk up this way but for the most part I was content on going straight up past the Scotia Bank theater and then to Robson. The Scotia Bank theater used to be called the Paramount and it had a pretty sign. Now it looks like a bank that plays over-priced movies and serves over-priced food. This was the only cinema I had gone to alone (except to see Metropolis). I know I've mentioned this before but going to the movies by yourself is one of the loneliest experiences you can have. This is ironic in that even as a group there is no real interaction once the film begins.
From:
To:
I saw Metropolis at the Pacific Cinematheque. I always thought it was a french theater because of the name. It's a very small art-house theater that has a very, very expensive projector that made the film look insanely sharp. Before the film I had a hot chocolate from Tim Horton's and I remember having to rush it down my throat before going to see the film. It was piping hot and I burned my tongue, roof and the back of my mouth. I realized after I had successfully finished it that they allow you to bring in outside food. Half of all the attendance was holding Starbucks cups. You can see why I would remember this.
There are no good photographs of this place because it's not much to look at from outside. When I googled the image bank there were an unusual number of photographs featuring Crispin Glover. He'd be perfect for the role of Toby in the movie version of my walk to work.
I also remember the long walk home after the film. It was Canada Day and the streets were running red with blood. Well blood or flags, I don't remember. I took the Burrard bridge back to the south side passing crowds of drunken patriots and girls in skimpy outfits. Am I the only heterosexual guy that gets less aroused and interested the sluttier an outfit gets? I want to point out that I use the word "slutty" to describe the uniform and not the person, people can dress however they want, some people choose to dress gross.
Back to the work-walk, the corner of Burrard and Robson is always busy. It's a good corner to find companies handing out promotional samples of hot-sauce or layered Trident gum. I've also gotten drinks, chocolate, shampoo, and annoyed. It was a good mix of everything. There is a large music store at the corner too. It's either and HMV or a Virgin and Ive never had to go inside. I don't know how music stores stay in business still. The last CD I bought was in 2004 and I only bought it because it came with buttons. It was The Faint's "Wet From Birth". It came out just as I was starting my job cleaning pools and I would listen to it while commuting all the way out there. There was a lot of Faint and Air on the headphones at the time.
Moving eastward you eventually arrive at Hornby and Robson. This is where the Vancouver Art gallery is located. The steps out front of the art gallery's unused doors is where protests and pillow fights tend to take place. Once Chloe and I saw this local "wonder"? by the name of Spandy Andy dancing amongst the street-punks on the stoop. His goal is to make people smile and that's exactly what he does. I remember also coming to this corner after the Olympic ceremonies and it was fucking insane. There were tens of thousands of people just going nuts on the street. They had the zip-line running over-head by that time which I never actual took part in because I'm far too cool for that.
The next corner to arrive on my morning commute was Howe St. There is a Chapter's on this corner but unlike the one at Granville and Broadway I couldn't urinate in it as they did not have a public washroom. They have one in the Starbucks attached but not in the actual book-store facilities. I thought that was always weird but I guess they don't want all the homeless people nearby to take dumps while reading Melville classics or Economics For Dummies.
I once moved all of the Michael Behe creationist books from the science section to where they belonged in religion. If you followed the bizarre world of "cdesign proponentsists" then this has some meaning to you. If it doesn't and you want a good laugh I would suggest looking it up.
On the other corner to the Chapters is the large Sears building. It's by far the ugliest structure in Vancouver. I know the entire department store inside and out. It was a good place to kill time and wander about before meeting someone or catching a movie. It was connected underground to the Pacific Center which is a small, sad downtown mall with a Holt Renfrew on one end. It wasn't open during the hours of my morning walk to work but I would often choose to walk through it after work just to people-watch or if it was raining, something very rare for Vancouver...
Instead I would keep outside and then make one of two possibilities at the corner of Granville and Robson. I would choose the way from here on a random whim and in order to fully describe the harrowing journey I feel they both need to be explained. This is by far my longest post ever.
The corner has an odd Future-shop/Winners combination on the North-East corner. It's odd because the stacking order goes: Crepe restaurant, Future Shop, Winners. The Crepe place gets the main floor for some reason forcing the much larger chains to be less accessible above. The Future Shop had a very large LCD display that showed various advertisements and other information. If you're familiar with the digital billboards you see on the Gardner Expressway out of Toronto it's very similar to that. When I live downtown as a married schmuck the flickering images from this sign would shine into my apartment and create an annoying distraction from both television watching and sleep. The apartment made me feel rich and urban and having the annoyance of the large screen hyped up the idea of being a city-man. In reality though the lifestyle I had while downtown was much more a kin to what it's like living in a small town like Sarnia. There was much more to see and do of course, but if Grey's Anatomy or House was on we weren't interested in the metropolitan all around. It's a sad fact of life and an excellent reason to not invest in a television.
Hmm. Okay so it turns out that this series is going to be a five parter. I've done three and now I figure it will take one for each of the last two routes from Granville and Robson. I'm probably going to lay low for a bit after wards. I may write more on a non-blog basis. I want to write a fictional story but I don't really know all the literary tricks. I figure I would just write a tale based on details I already remember. We'll see, I have a lot on my plate.
Songs of the week. The first song was an older Chicks On Speed song that I used to listen to obsessively in my post-grad year of school. I didn't know the name of it until I researched it today. I then found out that the song is actually a cover of an old B52's song. Now I'm obsessed with the orginal B52's version and especially this video. Look how young they all are! I'm not even going to bother with the Chicks On Speed version, just watch this one it's worth it:
I'm downtown this afternoon because I am meeting Mary after her shift so that we can drive to Peterborough to see the band Mother Mother. I ate only salad for my lunch so that we can stop along the way and get a Hot-N-Ready and I can enjoy the sweet, melty nectar of the tiny pizza without too much guilt. I took the liberty of researching all the Little Caesar's along the 401 to find out where the closest one to an exit is. I have settled for a location in Pickering at exit number three hundred and ninety four. Mary finishes her work at four and I figure this particular spot should be coming up about an hour and twenty minutes into the drive. I don't fuck around when it comes to pizza.
I don't expect this post to go up until Sunday or Monday. It's Saturday afternoon at this moment in time though. The sky is blueish and it's sunny out. The outside temperature as of thirty minutes ago was typical of the warmish Ontario spring day you normally associate with mid March. This type of afternoon reminds me of standing out front of my high-school at lunch, chilly but enjoying the heat from the sun on the back of my neck. Charles and I are standing while the rest of the gang sit on the sidewalk. They're certain to be passed the school property line because they smoke and don't want to risk the punishment for doing so on the grounds. For months they've had to huddle in the cold in order to sooth their newly formed nicotine addiction and now they get a chance to sit back and enjoy their tobacco from the comfort of less cold weather. At the time this felt like the center of the universe and it's only until we've reached reached our early twenties do we realize this was the same at a thousand different high-schools with a million different kids.
I have to finish this walk to work in Vancouver. The last post is riddled maggoty with spelling mistakes and errors despite the fact that I went over it three times. I really should have someone edit this shit before I share it with the 4 people who skim through it to kill time in that seven minutes from :53 to :00 when their HGTV show is about to start. Income Property... fuckin' right! My plan this round is to write it all out first and then go find the pictures during the editing. Normally I just go grab them as I write because I get excited about putting in an image. After I reread the last post I was pretty happy with the visuals. There were no good photographs of a few areas that I wanted to show and I really should have included a video of the Cashman when I made the Russell Oliver reference.
Also, how awesome would a cafe called "Demon's Chocolate Experience" be?
The Medium-Long Way to Work III: Turtles in Time
Standing at the base of the Burrard bridge from the south side the view is intimidating. It's a long walk to the apex before you descend into the city's core. In the morning there were always fellow pedestrians utilizing their leggy-wegs as a form of commute. This seems like it may be a bit of a foreign concept to the Ontarians reading. What I would normally do at the base is pick out another walker that was ahead of me about three hundred meters. I would tell myself that I would be off the bridge before them no matter what. My legs would pump frantically but on most days I was able to bypass them in the final 20 meters. It was a wonderful way to boost my ego and heart rate first thing in the morning.
The Burrard bridge used to have cycling and walking on each side of the bridge. In the last couple of years they closed off a few feet of road space on the south bound side for cyclists heading to Kitsilano and created a No-Pedestrian zone on the other side so that cyclists had more space when going into downtown. There was always a few idiots who either ignored the no walking signs or were simply too dumb to notice them. This was a common theme in Vancouver that I've mentioned a lot. Idiot walkers who give street-strutters like me a bad name.
There are also a lot of stupid cyclists too and we already know my opinion on automobile operators in this city. The awful side of all three types seems to have a different motivating factor behind the moronocity. The driver's hold the view point that walkers and cyclists are not as important as them and so automatically assume all intersections as their right of way. It comes off like they feel that because walkers and bikers are not driving expensive cars, they are poor and therefore do not hold jobs that require them to rush to work.
Shitty cyclists seem to hold a somewhat more pretentious view when I would see them blow through stop signs and cut off walkers. I get the strong feeling that they feel that motorized vehicles don't deserve any of the road so the signs that direct fossil-fueled traffic don't apply to them. I've seen plenty of them cut across a street close enough to an elderly person that you can hear the swooshing sound of the air-stream flowing around the senior.
The walker's of course don't seem arrogant or pretentious, they just seem like fucking idiots, unable to decipher large visual signs every ten feet that tell them the path they're on is for bicycles.
The corner of Burrard and Pacific is the base of yet another hill to climb. There is a video store about thirty feet up on the left that has had the same movie posters since I lived there four years ago. If I'm looking to rent a film and the establishment I wish to rent from is still celebrating the release of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, then chances are their selection is going to fucking suck. This particular shithole I believe mainly stays in business with the pornography they provide.
This stretch is like many, many other retails strips in Vancouver that run along the base of a highrise apartment building. There is always at least one hair salon, a sushi or bubble tea locale, a laundry or dry cleaner's and some kind of business that sells Auto Plan, the provincial automobile insurance. Most of the time you'll also get a place to have your nails done which will feature images of that shitty art from the 80's by Patrick Nagal. You know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't need to reference it with a picture.
This was true when I lived in the cities core during the wedded years. Our building also had a Starbucks and Nestor's supermarket too which classed it up a notch. That being said there was also a Domino's pizza and walk-in clinic to help bring that class back down. I ate so many fucking pizzas from there. It was 10 feet from the door of my building. In terms of steps it required less than fifty from my sofa to the order counter.
As you approach the mid-way point up the hill there is an intersection where three of the branches come from legitimate roads while one is the exit of an alleyway. For whatever reason drivers don't use the stop sign here. Ever. The amount of times I've witnessed very close near-misses is frightening.
As you continue upward to the peak you approach Davie street. On the East side of the street is this interesting store that has a glittery tank as their signage. They seem to specialize in exotic sneakers and those small artsy toys that cost like $200 bucks. The best part about this place is the staff. Everyone working there has that Wassup Rockers, L.A. latino, skateboard thing going on. It's an odd shop and I have no clue how they have managed to stay in business. I once almost bought a pair of shoes there. I couldn't bring myself to pay $140 for sneakers I knew would dissolve in a year's time. This was way back in the marital times when I had an unusually large amount of shoes. I kind of still do.
The corner of Burrard and Davie pretty much always has a weirdo of some kind roaming around. If you turn and go west up Davie you go through the "gay" village. It's essentially just like any other neighborhood but with more rainbows. I like the Davie village area. I would sometimes walk all the way up to Denman if I had a lot of time to kill. This area is where crazy Toby lived. Just to recap who that is, Toby was a man in his 70's that I worked with when I was finishing Cabinets and furniture. We would take the long bus rides together and he would tell me conspiracies about alien reptile people who control the world. If there was a conspiracy he believed it. He was at one point a lumberjack who lived up near the yukon and had some of the best stories ever. He would also do 18 pull-ups every morning. That's 17 more than I can do and he was 73. He weighed probably 110 pounds and was Swedish with a strong accent and always wore a baseball cap. He was also an inventor who had created some kind of braking system for roller-blades as well as an amazing snowshoe. He showed me images of the snowshoe once and I was blown away at how non-crazy it actually was. He's the type of person who stays in your memory forever with vivid clarity. I actually found a photograph of him online. It was from an article about his roller-blade brakes. Every other link with his name in google led me to some weirdo conspiracy site. Man, was he weird but amazing... even by my standards.
The Davie village also has the only Denny's I ever ate at. It was gross. The end.
Normally I would continue up Burrard passing the hospital, several junkies and some homeless people. I would normally cross over to the East side of the street so that I could walk by the Wall center. I liked the fountains and the overall landscaping of the open ares between the hotel and building. This eventually ended at Nelson. I used to catch my bus on Nelson about ten yards east of Burrard. The bus stop is no longer there which seems kind of fitting for some reason. I spent so many black, pre-dawn, early mornings standing there with my Tim Horton's french vanilla in hand. I can still visualize the blue and green mosaic tile work on the building across the street. It doesn't even feel like that was even a real period of time in my life. I'm like a real life version of that awful show Sliders. Every few years my existence enters a parallel dimension that looks nothing like the last.
Sometimes I would walk up this way but for the most part I was content on going straight up past the Scotia Bank theater and then to Robson. The Scotia Bank theater used to be called the Paramount and it had a pretty sign. Now it looks like a bank that plays over-priced movies and serves over-priced food. This was the only cinema I had gone to alone (except to see Metropolis). I know I've mentioned this before but going to the movies by yourself is one of the loneliest experiences you can have. This is ironic in that even as a group there is no real interaction once the film begins.
From:
To:
I saw Metropolis at the Pacific Cinematheque. I always thought it was a french theater because of the name. It's a very small art-house theater that has a very, very expensive projector that made the film look insanely sharp. Before the film I had a hot chocolate from Tim Horton's and I remember having to rush it down my throat before going to see the film. It was piping hot and I burned my tongue, roof and the back of my mouth. I realized after I had successfully finished it that they allow you to bring in outside food. Half of all the attendance was holding Starbucks cups. You can see why I would remember this.
There are no good photographs of this place because it's not much to look at from outside. When I googled the image bank there were an unusual number of photographs featuring Crispin Glover. He'd be perfect for the role of Toby in the movie version of my walk to work.
I also remember the long walk home after the film. It was Canada Day and the streets were running red with blood. Well blood or flags, I don't remember. I took the Burrard bridge back to the south side passing crowds of drunken patriots and girls in skimpy outfits. Am I the only heterosexual guy that gets less aroused and interested the sluttier an outfit gets? I want to point out that I use the word "slutty" to describe the uniform and not the person, people can dress however they want, some people choose to dress gross.
Back to the work-walk, the corner of Burrard and Robson is always busy. It's a good corner to find companies handing out promotional samples of hot-sauce or layered Trident gum. I've also gotten drinks, chocolate, shampoo, and annoyed. It was a good mix of everything. There is a large music store at the corner too. It's either and HMV or a Virgin and Ive never had to go inside. I don't know how music stores stay in business still. The last CD I bought was in 2004 and I only bought it because it came with buttons. It was The Faint's "Wet From Birth". It came out just as I was starting my job cleaning pools and I would listen to it while commuting all the way out there. There was a lot of Faint and Air on the headphones at the time.
Moving eastward you eventually arrive at Hornby and Robson. This is where the Vancouver Art gallery is located. The steps out front of the art gallery's unused doors is where protests and pillow fights tend to take place. Once Chloe and I saw this local "wonder"? by the name of Spandy Andy dancing amongst the street-punks on the stoop. His goal is to make people smile and that's exactly what he does. I remember also coming to this corner after the Olympic ceremonies and it was fucking insane. There were tens of thousands of people just going nuts on the street. They had the zip-line running over-head by that time which I never actual took part in because I'm far too cool for that.
The next corner to arrive on my morning commute was Howe St. There is a Chapter's on this corner but unlike the one at Granville and Broadway I couldn't urinate in it as they did not have a public washroom. They have one in the Starbucks attached but not in the actual book-store facilities. I thought that was always weird but I guess they don't want all the homeless people nearby to take dumps while reading Melville classics or Economics For Dummies.
I once moved all of the Michael Behe creationist books from the science section to where they belonged in religion. If you followed the bizarre world of "cdesign proponentsists" then this has some meaning to you. If it doesn't and you want a good laugh I would suggest looking it up.
On the other corner to the Chapters is the large Sears building. It's by far the ugliest structure in Vancouver. I know the entire department store inside and out. It was a good place to kill time and wander about before meeting someone or catching a movie. It was connected underground to the Pacific Center which is a small, sad downtown mall with a Holt Renfrew on one end. It wasn't open during the hours of my morning walk to work but I would often choose to walk through it after work just to people-watch or if it was raining, something very rare for Vancouver...
Instead I would keep outside and then make one of two possibilities at the corner of Granville and Robson. I would choose the way from here on a random whim and in order to fully describe the harrowing journey I feel they both need to be explained. This is by far my longest post ever.
The corner has an odd Future-shop/Winners combination on the North-East corner. It's odd because the stacking order goes: Crepe restaurant, Future Shop, Winners. The Crepe place gets the main floor for some reason forcing the much larger chains to be less accessible above. The Future Shop had a very large LCD display that showed various advertisements and other information. If you're familiar with the digital billboards you see on the Gardner Expressway out of Toronto it's very similar to that. When I live downtown as a married schmuck the flickering images from this sign would shine into my apartment and create an annoying distraction from both television watching and sleep. The apartment made me feel rich and urban and having the annoyance of the large screen hyped up the idea of being a city-man. In reality though the lifestyle I had while downtown was much more a kin to what it's like living in a small town like Sarnia. There was much more to see and do of course, but if Grey's Anatomy or House was on we weren't interested in the metropolitan all around. It's a sad fact of life and an excellent reason to not invest in a television.
Hmm. Okay so it turns out that this series is going to be a five parter. I've done three and now I figure it will take one for each of the last two routes from Granville and Robson. I'm probably going to lay low for a bit after wards. I may write more on a non-blog basis. I want to write a fictional story but I don't really know all the literary tricks. I figure I would just write a tale based on details I already remember. We'll see, I have a lot on my plate.
Songs of the week. The first song was an older Chicks On Speed song that I used to listen to obsessively in my post-grad year of school. I didn't know the name of it until I researched it today. I then found out that the song is actually a cover of an old B52's song. Now I'm obsessed with the orginal B52's version and especially this video. Look how young they all are! I'm not even going to bother with the Chicks On Speed version, just watch this one it's worth it:
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Phantom Belly
My sense of time confuses me sometimes. I'll see a reference to something from a year ago and it feels like just a week or two. I know it's quite common but it still messes me up in the noggin. My short term memory takes far more concentration to remember details than events that happened nine or ten months ago. It probably has a lot more to do with the fact that I only get out of the apartment once a week. I literally stay in the same three rooms Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon. The only time I leave is either to go to Thorold to see Mary, or when Mary comes here and we get out briefly. I'm officially a Julian.
I wasn't going to mention this because it's probably not a good thing but on Saturday evening I'm pretty sure I had what is called a "simple partial seizure". It's different from a complex partial or a grand mal epileptic seizure, which I've also had before. I wasn't sure what the episode was until I began to look it up and found that every single detail to a simple partial seizure fit exactly. Of course I can't be entirely sure because I didn't go to the hospital. I'm not worried about it really because it's the mildest form of a seizure you can have. I'll try to describe what it was like for you. I realize that much of what I write will come off as an exaggeration but I don't think it is. Hopefully I don't get into too much trouble either.
It began while Mary and I were in bed. We were watching Rules of Attraction on the laptop and were getting "close". Seemingly out of nowhere an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety came over me. I could feeling something wasn't right but I couldn't do anything. This wasn't a normal anxiety attack, which I would have on a frequent bases and still do on occasion. It was very similar to the same feeling you get when you're really, really high. Mary was concerned of course but for some reason I wouldn't let her get up. I think I just kept repeating that something was wrong and put my hand over my eyes to block out the light. Then the pain started. It felt like a vein just above my eye way going to burst. I could feel pulse it by the touch and remember trying to get Mary to feel if it was actually swelling. Then a sharp pain in my right forearm appeared and all I could think was that I was having either a stroke or more likely an aneurysm. I was fully conscious still but was having a lot of trouble moving. Mary started to ask if it may be my heart and tried to feel my pulse. This was because of the arm pain which I think only happens in the left arm. Also there was no burnt toast.
As I lay there with my hand over eyes and my head throbbing I began to go in and out of consciousness. Mary thought I was falling asleep but I wasn't tired enough and when I came back into focus I was very awake and aware. Things then got even stranger and I couldn't tell if I was talking or not, if she was even there or how long this was happening. Again, it was very, very much like being super high, except for the pain.
While this was going on the fear shifted to an insane feeling of disappointment and shame. I remember apologizing to Mary for being a disappointment. I pretty much always suffer from the feeling that I'm a worthless bag of cells which I take magic pills to lessen but this was slightly different. If this was just a panic attack, it was the strongest panic attack I've ever had. When this feeling took over the really weird shit started.
I was still unable to tell what was actually real while at the same time fully recognizing that my brain was having an event. This is one of the indicators of this type of seizure, being aware of the delusion without being able to do anything about it. All of my skin started to feel tingly and sensitive. I thought it was kind of awesome at this point even though I knew this wasn't a good sign. I have no idea how long I was doing this but I kept touching my face which felt euphoric. My skin seemed to have this insane, tactile sensitivity so when I touched stuff it felt like running my fingers over a steel brush. Because both my hands and my skin did this, when I touched my face the feeling was compounded into this sensation that is indescribable. My head was still giving off the same fierce pain and I was still in a state where I could barely move but I was obsessed with this feeling. I remember asking Mary if she could feel it which made complete sense to me at the time. I can only imagine what this must have looked like from her point of view.
It sounds kind of comical when I explain it but it was terrifying and much more serious a situation than I can convey. I've had a lot of "unusual" medical experiences in the last few years so I kind of have a good sense of when things are more than just a little off. This was right up there with the strangest of them. I've had seizures before but have no memory of them at all beyond vaguely recalling having to watch a video on an iPod of my eyes vibrating during mid-seizure. Once you've had them you're more likely to have them again. It wasn't anywhere close to being something that I thought needed risking hospitalization and after about 30 minutes most of the effects were gone. The sensitive touch stuff lasted most of the night though so at least I had that as a bonus.
I could of course be remembering it entirely skewed to what it actually looked like. Hopefully Mary can verify some of it anyway. I'm not going to worry about it now because even if it was a simple partial seizure it's unlikely that I'll get another one that is more serious.
The next parts were written last Friday, before the bizarre episode.
I assume everyone has heard about the psychological phenomenon whereby a person with an amputated limb still feels various sensations despite the arm or leg or whatever not being there. It makes complete logical sense when you consider that every sensation or itch or weighted feeling is all just impulses in our brains. When your leg hurts it's your brain that interprets the impulse that causes the feeling of pain, not the actual leg.
Anyway sometimes I get that feeling with my mid-region. I know it's very different from a phantom limb but I will often try to rest my arm where my stomach used to be which is like four inches from where it is now. Most of the time I feel like I'm at the same weight that I was two years ago. I mean that in a physical sense. I feel like my body is bigger than it actually is. This can't be a good sign.
The vast majority of people who lose weight gain it all back within five years. I used to think it was a lack of discipline in keeping the weight off but I think it has more to do with stress and the fact that even after it's gone you still feel like you're still pretty much the same size. I think about my appetite and weight at least once every 20 min all day, every day. I'm not exaggerating at all, just ask Mary. I try to account for every calorie I eat and yet I always feel like I'm falling behind. I'm terrified of gaining it back to the point where I will easily sacrifice happiness over scrawnicity.
If anyone is considering trying to lose weight let me be the first to tell you, it kind of sucks. Losing it is easy, really easy. Just stop eating more than 1200 calories a day and after like two months it just sheds. The real problem with changing your diet is the guilt and fear. It haunts me whenever I have even one of something I would normally have eaten ten of without question. When I compare what I eat now with what I would eat even two years ago I'm amazed wasn't at least 350 to 400 pounds. Seriously, my breakfasts alone were over 1200 calories. I would eat one and a half large Dominoes pizzas, a bag of crazy bread and another 1500 calories in dessert in one sitting without pauses or breaks. Actually that's probably not nearly as bad as a few other meals I can think of. I wish I didn't care and agonize as much as I do and yet I'm oddly proud of my ability to develop a fill-fledged eating disorder. It's a constant thing you're always aware of so if you hate having a lot of extra stress, it really does kind of suck.
The Medium-Long Way Part II:
City Hall is at the corner of 12th and Cambie. It's a beautiful deco period building but has this giant pink and blue neon clock at the top. It makes me think I can sell them my old gold jewelry for ca$h. Mayor Russel Oliver? It's kind of a small city hall for a city that size and the fact that it's not directly in the downtown core is also a little odd.
I used to walk right down Cambie to Broadway but in the final metaphorical hours of my metaphorical day in Vancouver I began to stroll through the City Hall grounds to get to Broadway. This added a little bit of interest to the walk and gave me a kind of badass feeling like I wasn't supposed to be strutting my business through this official fancy-spot. I was a rebel Dotty, a loner.
Behind City Hall there is big statue of a guy pointing toward the East end. I assume it's a way to let visitors in the area know which direction they need to head if they want heroin. What a thoughtful statue. Anyway here's some images including one amazing city hall photo that I stumbled upon.
After the statue there is a decent sized set of steps that leads down into a kind of grassy courtyard. There is a community garden in this tiny parkish area which is awesome. It ruins the overall clean, "golf-courseness" you'd expect from a government building but it is a great way to inspire that kind of project. I once watched skateboards filming a scene at the next set of stairs leading out back to Cambie. It was the best skateboarding I had ever seen in person. I can't find the video online, sorry. I wonder if I can find a video of skateboarders tending to the garden... nope.
Tenth street is at the top of the hill leading down to the entrance for the underground and ironically named skytrain. At the top near Tenth the space was kind of useless so the city built these flat concrete levels that served no real purpose but did contain some amazing cow sculptures. I regularly saw Vancouver police searching cyclists and skateboarders who were just sitting on the steps on these levels. It could be a popular spot to buy drugs but I mean honestly, if the police were interested in finding drugs there is an entire section of the city to check. Fuck, there's even a statue showing them which direction to get there. here's a close up of a cow:
The corner of Cambie and Broadway is like the epitome of life in Vancouver. There's a Starbucks, Lululemon, Whole Food's and a bunch of asian-style restaurants. There was a time in my life when living in this section would have greatly appealed to me. I feel ashamed now when I think about the phase that I actually admired glass highrises and the goofs who lived in them. I often get these triggered feelings that aren't really memories but rather a kind of time-warp back to certain lifestyle-phases. Each time period seems to have a distinct set of sensory characteristics. Different routines get established that eventually evolve into the next stage of routines, locations, jobs, music ect. They can be triggered by smells or sounds and feel very foreign like I'm inadvertently hacking some other person's past. I just assume everyone gets these flashbacks. If not it means you're stale and boring.
Cambie and Broadway was where my Blenz coffee shop was. I keep wanting to spell it Blendz with a "d" but I'd be wrong. In my final month I would eat there everyday. They had these fucking enormous rice-krispy squares and those cornflake nature bars. I mentioned this place a lot and it was the very last place I sat in besides the airport when I had left the west coast. It was a great place to get the giant squares because if I couldn't resist and needed a second I could judge exactly how much extra walking I would need in order to work it off. If I went my normal route from that location I was actually walking in the complete opposite direction to where I worked. If I didn't have enough time though I could easily go over the Cambie bridge and get to the office in 20 minutes. If I had 40 minutes I knew I wouldn't be able make it going up to Granville and so I would instead go under the Cambie bridge and around through the Olympic village and eventually Science World. This was a better option than arriving early. Early at my work usually meant of a lot of "Sorry I don't have any change on me" so I wanted to time everything just right and avoid the annoyance.
I liked the section of Broadway between Granville and Cambie. It was full of the kinds of businesses that seem like they would have been failures if they were closer to the city's core. Computer repair shops, mattress boutiques, christian and educational book stores and places that sold pianos. They were always empty and made me wonder how they managed to survive. How many pianos would they sell a month to justify keeping the business open? There were also a lot of medical supply places too as the hospital was only a block up. I remember wondering if they had those chest compressors that I had wanted but for some reason I thought that you needed to be in the medical profession to buy there. You have to show your special medicine decoder ring and do a secret nurses hand shake.
On weekday mornings this stretch would have an entirely different set of people than the weekend. I remember once getting into an unspoken walk-off with another business man. He was the only person ever to beat me and I slowed my pace slightly in defeat to let him know I had conceded the race. I remember it well and it still stings a little. It ended just as we came down the slight slope from the Boston Pizza that ended at the Smart Car dealership across from a Denny's. This was a block from Granville at Hemlock. If I turned right and gone down the steep hill I would have eventually ended up on the alternate entrance to the Granville bridge. I rarely used this method though because it meant I didn't get the satisfaction of using the crosswalk and giving the assholes who don't obey it the finger. I counted the number of crosswalk signs that appear as you drive up this way... There are five crosswalk signs which coincidentally is also the IQ of most Vancouver motorists.
The corner of Granville and Broadway looks like the fancy corner you'd expect to see in any large city. In Montreal terms it's not quite a Peel and St. Catherine but more like a Mont Royal and Saint Denis. I have no clue what a Toronto conversion looks like. I just had one of those flashbacks to the last time I was in Montreal. It was in 2009 and I hadn't been back since I lived there years earlier. It was summer and everything felt slightly wrong. It all seemed slightly skewed from when I had lived there and it felt like I (we) should not have gone. It was like an episode of Eerie, Indiana. The corner of Granville and Broadway was the opposite of that. I felt comfortable and native. For whatever reason I enjoy standing at the corner and watching the world interact for a moment and then shoot off into different directions. I would often urinate at the Chapter's, as the location was a kind of half-way zone and I didn't feel bad about not buying anything. It's a rather unusually laid out store and require an escalator to get at the non-sale items.
The walk to work required me to cross over Granville, usually on the north side of the street. In the busy morning the sidewalk gets very heavily congested with people waiting for their buses. There are a couple used bookstores opposite the bus stops but I had never actually gone in. The shear volume of Sylvie Browne and Kevin Trudeau they were peddling was more than enough to keep me out. I mean if they have no problem showcasing dangerous human-feces like those two imagine what kind of nonsense was waiting inside. I should title this post "dangerous human feces".
Across the street and down a little from the Chapters was a chocolate cafe with a name like "Diablo" or "Devil's", something "D" and evil sounding. I don't think I ever went in there during my last phase but I have a vague memory of patroning this location way back in my wedded years. Like many of those memories though I can't really be certain which makes me think I hadn't. Going to a cafe that specializes in chocolate is something you don't forget. "Demon's Chocolate Experience"? "Death by Chocolate"! I had to look it up.
If I wanted to cross the Granville Bridge this was the corner to do so. Fir St, not to be confused with First St. How you get at the sidewalk that leads to the bridge involves essentially walking into the middle of the busy street and hoping the cars are driving much slower than they look. I always though it was strange that there was no real crossing setup. I preferred taking this route over the bridge because for whatever reason felt sunnier and had a better view that the other side just 40 feet away. Midway you get stuff like this:
Once while walking on the section of Fir St that is elevated but not quite the bridge I ended inside a cordoned off area that was probably a lot more dangerous than I had realized. The city had blocked off the side walk and was taking the paint off the rail using a very high-pressured squirt-gun. This wasn't like the sprayers they use to clean sidewalks downtown, it was some heavy duty shit. Anyway, from the direction I was coming the crew had forgotten to put up a temporary no-sidewalk sign. As I approached the scene I had had to physically walk down the road which was not closed and is very busy with poor visibility. I stayed as close to the curb as possible and assumed that the idiots the cities employs, who were all in protective gear, would pause as I passed by. They didn't. At the time it was more of a wet inconvenience than a potential injury zone. If the water stream had hit me it probably would have done a lot of damage. If the splashes had hit me it probably would have burned my face. If the thick, industrial paint chips had shot out at me they probably would have cut me pretty deep. Think back to the setup I think it was luck that nothing bad happened. Describing the scene now it's difficult to explain just how close and how dangerous it all potentially was. Meh.
If, while back on Broadway I decided to go a longer route, I would continue on to Burrard or Arbutus. This involved passing the first Earl's I ever ate at. This was way the fuck back when the ex-wife and I had gone out there to find a place to live. I had this noodle dish that was like a Pad Thai with pork and pineapple. It was fucking amazing. When we eventually moved there and would take family-guests to Earl's this meal had disappeared from the menu. They had something kind of like it but it sucked. Earl's was a BC exclusive phenomenon until recently. Now they have one just down the highway at Mapleview Mall in Burlington. They also have an East Side Mario's and Pepper Jack's... Talk about getting declassified. BC has a number of eatery-chains that Ontario didn't until the last year or so. I think they have a Triple Oh's in Toronto now which just seems wrong. Next we'll begin to see Whitespots on every corner. That sounds so wrong, and from a taster's perspective it is. I fully expect to start seeing Vera Burgers, Waves and of course Blenz in the GTA soon. It's kind of sad in to be honest.
Burrard and Broadway is a strange intersection. I seems like it would be a big, fancy deal like Granville and Broadway but instead it's closer to a Barton and Sherman in Hamilton or a Sherbrooke and Decarie in Montreal. You can always tell that a stretch of retail along a busy street is officially dead when a store that specializes in "Spy" equipment is the most successful business there. I wonder how many creepy landlords have purchased the hidden cameras they install in their tenant's bathrooms have come from here? I bet it's a lot more that you'd think. Also, you might want to pause and check the vent/fan in your own bathroom, cause you're probably being jerked off to by Japanese men in front of their computers every time you move your bowels.
Broadway eventually begins to get better if you continue going west. It takes a while and if you have the legs for it you're much better off going down to 4th and strolling that beat. Burrard was my standard path on the medium-long way to work. It wasn't nearly as interesting to look at as going further into kits but it was a good source of exercise and did the job.
As you head down the hill toward the base of the bridge you begin to see a series of car dealerships that specialize in serving douchebags. Ferrari, Lotus, Aston-Martin, all the asshole-cars you'd love to see get smashed up. There is also a gun/militia store too in case you're bomb-shelter needs to be restocked with ammunition, fatigues, those green, steal boxes you lock food in and swords for some reason. I never get the fascination with swords. This stretch of Burrard is where you go if you require phallic substitutes for your tiny dinky, either in the form of an expensive automobile or a sharp, pointy stick. There is also a drive-in dry cleaners that looks straight out the early 60's. I don't they sell anything that replaces ya' ding-dong.
4th St. was always this really hip spot when I had lived there years before. It has the reputation as being a hip, fashiony, restauranty strip but as I became more and more familiar with the area started to seem explicitly phony. It was still much more interesting than Broadway but had this negative quality to it that was hard to put your finger on. It was the opposite to the feeling you get walking the Mount Pleasant or Cambie Village circuit. Burrard and 4th was where you usually begin a street-strut if you're going to do a shopping mission. In the morning though it was just another intersection with lamp posts covered in up-coming concert posters for me to consider and then not attend.
The base of Burrard was where the hill flattened out to sea level. There is a large park-type area with a shitty fountain. In the spring this park had cherry blossoms kicking some sweet visual ass. The only people I ever saw in the park though were homeless folk nestled under rotting sleeping bags and layers of cardboard. It was a pretty big, open area but was not any place you want to go for a picnic or dog-walk or frisbee tournament. Behind it was the saddest looking Canadian Tire I ever saw. I don't think it was even a Canadian Tire anymore during my last life in Vancouver. The building is so sad that I have no idea what it housed other than a sports store of some kind.
On the other side of the street was a fantastic looking military armory that I assume is now used to host expensive weddings. This was next to the beer plant. If I drank beer I'd be able to tell you if it was Molson or Labbatt without looking it up but I can't... Molson.
Next post I'll continue on up the bridge and into the cities core. The photos downtown will be much more interesting I'm sure. I think after I finish this walk I'm going to do a tour-by-memory of Portland. It's been a while.
Songs of the week, they kind of sound like Broadway if you play them in order:
I wasn't going to mention this because it's probably not a good thing but on Saturday evening I'm pretty sure I had what is called a "simple partial seizure". It's different from a complex partial or a grand mal epileptic seizure, which I've also had before. I wasn't sure what the episode was until I began to look it up and found that every single detail to a simple partial seizure fit exactly. Of course I can't be entirely sure because I didn't go to the hospital. I'm not worried about it really because it's the mildest form of a seizure you can have. I'll try to describe what it was like for you. I realize that much of what I write will come off as an exaggeration but I don't think it is. Hopefully I don't get into too much trouble either.
It began while Mary and I were in bed. We were watching Rules of Attraction on the laptop and were getting "close". Seemingly out of nowhere an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety came over me. I could feeling something wasn't right but I couldn't do anything. This wasn't a normal anxiety attack, which I would have on a frequent bases and still do on occasion. It was very similar to the same feeling you get when you're really, really high. Mary was concerned of course but for some reason I wouldn't let her get up. I think I just kept repeating that something was wrong and put my hand over my eyes to block out the light. Then the pain started. It felt like a vein just above my eye way going to burst. I could feel pulse it by the touch and remember trying to get Mary to feel if it was actually swelling. Then a sharp pain in my right forearm appeared and all I could think was that I was having either a stroke or more likely an aneurysm. I was fully conscious still but was having a lot of trouble moving. Mary started to ask if it may be my heart and tried to feel my pulse. This was because of the arm pain which I think only happens in the left arm. Also there was no burnt toast.
As I lay there with my hand over eyes and my head throbbing I began to go in and out of consciousness. Mary thought I was falling asleep but I wasn't tired enough and when I came back into focus I was very awake and aware. Things then got even stranger and I couldn't tell if I was talking or not, if she was even there or how long this was happening. Again, it was very, very much like being super high, except for the pain.
While this was going on the fear shifted to an insane feeling of disappointment and shame. I remember apologizing to Mary for being a disappointment. I pretty much always suffer from the feeling that I'm a worthless bag of cells which I take magic pills to lessen but this was slightly different. If this was just a panic attack, it was the strongest panic attack I've ever had. When this feeling took over the really weird shit started.
I was still unable to tell what was actually real while at the same time fully recognizing that my brain was having an event. This is one of the indicators of this type of seizure, being aware of the delusion without being able to do anything about it. All of my skin started to feel tingly and sensitive. I thought it was kind of awesome at this point even though I knew this wasn't a good sign. I have no idea how long I was doing this but I kept touching my face which felt euphoric. My skin seemed to have this insane, tactile sensitivity so when I touched stuff it felt like running my fingers over a steel brush. Because both my hands and my skin did this, when I touched my face the feeling was compounded into this sensation that is indescribable. My head was still giving off the same fierce pain and I was still in a state where I could barely move but I was obsessed with this feeling. I remember asking Mary if she could feel it which made complete sense to me at the time. I can only imagine what this must have looked like from her point of view.
It sounds kind of comical when I explain it but it was terrifying and much more serious a situation than I can convey. I've had a lot of "unusual" medical experiences in the last few years so I kind of have a good sense of when things are more than just a little off. This was right up there with the strangest of them. I've had seizures before but have no memory of them at all beyond vaguely recalling having to watch a video on an iPod of my eyes vibrating during mid-seizure. Once you've had them you're more likely to have them again. It wasn't anywhere close to being something that I thought needed risking hospitalization and after about 30 minutes most of the effects were gone. The sensitive touch stuff lasted most of the night though so at least I had that as a bonus.
I could of course be remembering it entirely skewed to what it actually looked like. Hopefully Mary can verify some of it anyway. I'm not going to worry about it now because even if it was a simple partial seizure it's unlikely that I'll get another one that is more serious.
The next parts were written last Friday, before the bizarre episode.
I assume everyone has heard about the psychological phenomenon whereby a person with an amputated limb still feels various sensations despite the arm or leg or whatever not being there. It makes complete logical sense when you consider that every sensation or itch or weighted feeling is all just impulses in our brains. When your leg hurts it's your brain that interprets the impulse that causes the feeling of pain, not the actual leg.
Anyway sometimes I get that feeling with my mid-region. I know it's very different from a phantom limb but I will often try to rest my arm where my stomach used to be which is like four inches from where it is now. Most of the time I feel like I'm at the same weight that I was two years ago. I mean that in a physical sense. I feel like my body is bigger than it actually is. This can't be a good sign.
The vast majority of people who lose weight gain it all back within five years. I used to think it was a lack of discipline in keeping the weight off but I think it has more to do with stress and the fact that even after it's gone you still feel like you're still pretty much the same size. I think about my appetite and weight at least once every 20 min all day, every day. I'm not exaggerating at all, just ask Mary. I try to account for every calorie I eat and yet I always feel like I'm falling behind. I'm terrified of gaining it back to the point where I will easily sacrifice happiness over scrawnicity.
If anyone is considering trying to lose weight let me be the first to tell you, it kind of sucks. Losing it is easy, really easy. Just stop eating more than 1200 calories a day and after like two months it just sheds. The real problem with changing your diet is the guilt and fear. It haunts me whenever I have even one of something I would normally have eaten ten of without question. When I compare what I eat now with what I would eat even two years ago I'm amazed wasn't at least 350 to 400 pounds. Seriously, my breakfasts alone were over 1200 calories. I would eat one and a half large Dominoes pizzas, a bag of crazy bread and another 1500 calories in dessert in one sitting without pauses or breaks. Actually that's probably not nearly as bad as a few other meals I can think of. I wish I didn't care and agonize as much as I do and yet I'm oddly proud of my ability to develop a fill-fledged eating disorder. It's a constant thing you're always aware of so if you hate having a lot of extra stress, it really does kind of suck.
The Medium-Long Way Part II:
City Hall is at the corner of 12th and Cambie. It's a beautiful deco period building but has this giant pink and blue neon clock at the top. It makes me think I can sell them my old gold jewelry for ca$h. Mayor Russel Oliver? It's kind of a small city hall for a city that size and the fact that it's not directly in the downtown core is also a little odd.
I used to walk right down Cambie to Broadway but in the final metaphorical hours of my metaphorical day in Vancouver I began to stroll through the City Hall grounds to get to Broadway. This added a little bit of interest to the walk and gave me a kind of badass feeling like I wasn't supposed to be strutting my business through this official fancy-spot. I was a rebel Dotty, a loner.
Behind City Hall there is big statue of a guy pointing toward the East end. I assume it's a way to let visitors in the area know which direction they need to head if they want heroin. What a thoughtful statue. Anyway here's some images including one amazing city hall photo that I stumbled upon.
After the statue there is a decent sized set of steps that leads down into a kind of grassy courtyard. There is a community garden in this tiny parkish area which is awesome. It ruins the overall clean, "golf-courseness" you'd expect from a government building but it is a great way to inspire that kind of project. I once watched skateboards filming a scene at the next set of stairs leading out back to Cambie. It was the best skateboarding I had ever seen in person. I can't find the video online, sorry. I wonder if I can find a video of skateboarders tending to the garden... nope.
Tenth street is at the top of the hill leading down to the entrance for the underground and ironically named skytrain. At the top near Tenth the space was kind of useless so the city built these flat concrete levels that served no real purpose but did contain some amazing cow sculptures. I regularly saw Vancouver police searching cyclists and skateboarders who were just sitting on the steps on these levels. It could be a popular spot to buy drugs but I mean honestly, if the police were interested in finding drugs there is an entire section of the city to check. Fuck, there's even a statue showing them which direction to get there. here's a close up of a cow:
The corner of Cambie and Broadway is like the epitome of life in Vancouver. There's a Starbucks, Lululemon, Whole Food's and a bunch of asian-style restaurants. There was a time in my life when living in this section would have greatly appealed to me. I feel ashamed now when I think about the phase that I actually admired glass highrises and the goofs who lived in them. I often get these triggered feelings that aren't really memories but rather a kind of time-warp back to certain lifestyle-phases. Each time period seems to have a distinct set of sensory characteristics. Different routines get established that eventually evolve into the next stage of routines, locations, jobs, music ect. They can be triggered by smells or sounds and feel very foreign like I'm inadvertently hacking some other person's past. I just assume everyone gets these flashbacks. If not it means you're stale and boring.
Cambie and Broadway was where my Blenz coffee shop was. I keep wanting to spell it Blendz with a "d" but I'd be wrong. In my final month I would eat there everyday. They had these fucking enormous rice-krispy squares and those cornflake nature bars. I mentioned this place a lot and it was the very last place I sat in besides the airport when I had left the west coast. It was a great place to get the giant squares because if I couldn't resist and needed a second I could judge exactly how much extra walking I would need in order to work it off. If I went my normal route from that location I was actually walking in the complete opposite direction to where I worked. If I didn't have enough time though I could easily go over the Cambie bridge and get to the office in 20 minutes. If I had 40 minutes I knew I wouldn't be able make it going up to Granville and so I would instead go under the Cambie bridge and around through the Olympic village and eventually Science World. This was a better option than arriving early. Early at my work usually meant of a lot of "Sorry I don't have any change on me" so I wanted to time everything just right and avoid the annoyance.
I liked the section of Broadway between Granville and Cambie. It was full of the kinds of businesses that seem like they would have been failures if they were closer to the city's core. Computer repair shops, mattress boutiques, christian and educational book stores and places that sold pianos. They were always empty and made me wonder how they managed to survive. How many pianos would they sell a month to justify keeping the business open? There were also a lot of medical supply places too as the hospital was only a block up. I remember wondering if they had those chest compressors that I had wanted but for some reason I thought that you needed to be in the medical profession to buy there. You have to show your special medicine decoder ring and do a secret nurses hand shake.
On weekday mornings this stretch would have an entirely different set of people than the weekend. I remember once getting into an unspoken walk-off with another business man. He was the only person ever to beat me and I slowed my pace slightly in defeat to let him know I had conceded the race. I remember it well and it still stings a little. It ended just as we came down the slight slope from the Boston Pizza that ended at the Smart Car dealership across from a Denny's. This was a block from Granville at Hemlock. If I turned right and gone down the steep hill I would have eventually ended up on the alternate entrance to the Granville bridge. I rarely used this method though because it meant I didn't get the satisfaction of using the crosswalk and giving the assholes who don't obey it the finger. I counted the number of crosswalk signs that appear as you drive up this way... There are five crosswalk signs which coincidentally is also the IQ of most Vancouver motorists.
The corner of Granville and Broadway looks like the fancy corner you'd expect to see in any large city. In Montreal terms it's not quite a Peel and St. Catherine but more like a Mont Royal and Saint Denis. I have no clue what a Toronto conversion looks like. I just had one of those flashbacks to the last time I was in Montreal. It was in 2009 and I hadn't been back since I lived there years earlier. It was summer and everything felt slightly wrong. It all seemed slightly skewed from when I had lived there and it felt like I (we) should not have gone. It was like an episode of Eerie, Indiana. The corner of Granville and Broadway was the opposite of that. I felt comfortable and native. For whatever reason I enjoy standing at the corner and watching the world interact for a moment and then shoot off into different directions. I would often urinate at the Chapter's, as the location was a kind of half-way zone and I didn't feel bad about not buying anything. It's a rather unusually laid out store and require an escalator to get at the non-sale items.
The walk to work required me to cross over Granville, usually on the north side of the street. In the busy morning the sidewalk gets very heavily congested with people waiting for their buses. There are a couple used bookstores opposite the bus stops but I had never actually gone in. The shear volume of Sylvie Browne and Kevin Trudeau they were peddling was more than enough to keep me out. I mean if they have no problem showcasing dangerous human-feces like those two imagine what kind of nonsense was waiting inside. I should title this post "dangerous human feces".
Across the street and down a little from the Chapters was a chocolate cafe with a name like "Diablo" or "Devil's", something "D" and evil sounding. I don't think I ever went in there during my last phase but I have a vague memory of patroning this location way back in my wedded years. Like many of those memories though I can't really be certain which makes me think I hadn't. Going to a cafe that specializes in chocolate is something you don't forget. "Demon's Chocolate Experience"? "Death by Chocolate"! I had to look it up.
If I wanted to cross the Granville Bridge this was the corner to do so. Fir St, not to be confused with First St. How you get at the sidewalk that leads to the bridge involves essentially walking into the middle of the busy street and hoping the cars are driving much slower than they look. I always though it was strange that there was no real crossing setup. I preferred taking this route over the bridge because for whatever reason felt sunnier and had a better view that the other side just 40 feet away. Midway you get stuff like this:
Once while walking on the section of Fir St that is elevated but not quite the bridge I ended inside a cordoned off area that was probably a lot more dangerous than I had realized. The city had blocked off the side walk and was taking the paint off the rail using a very high-pressured squirt-gun. This wasn't like the sprayers they use to clean sidewalks downtown, it was some heavy duty shit. Anyway, from the direction I was coming the crew had forgotten to put up a temporary no-sidewalk sign. As I approached the scene I had had to physically walk down the road which was not closed and is very busy with poor visibility. I stayed as close to the curb as possible and assumed that the idiots the cities employs, who were all in protective gear, would pause as I passed by. They didn't. At the time it was more of a wet inconvenience than a potential injury zone. If the water stream had hit me it probably would have done a lot of damage. If the splashes had hit me it probably would have burned my face. If the thick, industrial paint chips had shot out at me they probably would have cut me pretty deep. Think back to the setup I think it was luck that nothing bad happened. Describing the scene now it's difficult to explain just how close and how dangerous it all potentially was. Meh.
If, while back on Broadway I decided to go a longer route, I would continue on to Burrard or Arbutus. This involved passing the first Earl's I ever ate at. This was way the fuck back when the ex-wife and I had gone out there to find a place to live. I had this noodle dish that was like a Pad Thai with pork and pineapple. It was fucking amazing. When we eventually moved there and would take family-guests to Earl's this meal had disappeared from the menu. They had something kind of like it but it sucked. Earl's was a BC exclusive phenomenon until recently. Now they have one just down the highway at Mapleview Mall in Burlington. They also have an East Side Mario's and Pepper Jack's... Talk about getting declassified. BC has a number of eatery-chains that Ontario didn't until the last year or so. I think they have a Triple Oh's in Toronto now which just seems wrong. Next we'll begin to see Whitespots on every corner. That sounds so wrong, and from a taster's perspective it is. I fully expect to start seeing Vera Burgers, Waves and of course Blenz in the GTA soon. It's kind of sad in to be honest.
Burrard and Broadway is a strange intersection. I seems like it would be a big, fancy deal like Granville and Broadway but instead it's closer to a Barton and Sherman in Hamilton or a Sherbrooke and Decarie in Montreal. You can always tell that a stretch of retail along a busy street is officially dead when a store that specializes in "Spy" equipment is the most successful business there. I wonder how many creepy landlords have purchased the hidden cameras they install in their tenant's bathrooms have come from here? I bet it's a lot more that you'd think. Also, you might want to pause and check the vent/fan in your own bathroom, cause you're probably being jerked off to by Japanese men in front of their computers every time you move your bowels.
Broadway eventually begins to get better if you continue going west. It takes a while and if you have the legs for it you're much better off going down to 4th and strolling that beat. Burrard was my standard path on the medium-long way to work. It wasn't nearly as interesting to look at as going further into kits but it was a good source of exercise and did the job.
As you head down the hill toward the base of the bridge you begin to see a series of car dealerships that specialize in serving douchebags. Ferrari, Lotus, Aston-Martin, all the asshole-cars you'd love to see get smashed up. There is also a gun/militia store too in case you're bomb-shelter needs to be restocked with ammunition, fatigues, those green, steal boxes you lock food in and swords for some reason. I never get the fascination with swords. This stretch of Burrard is where you go if you require phallic substitutes for your tiny dinky, either in the form of an expensive automobile or a sharp, pointy stick. There is also a drive-in dry cleaners that looks straight out the early 60's. I don't they sell anything that replaces ya' ding-dong.
4th St. was always this really hip spot when I had lived there years before. It has the reputation as being a hip, fashiony, restauranty strip but as I became more and more familiar with the area started to seem explicitly phony. It was still much more interesting than Broadway but had this negative quality to it that was hard to put your finger on. It was the opposite to the feeling you get walking the Mount Pleasant or Cambie Village circuit. Burrard and 4th was where you usually begin a street-strut if you're going to do a shopping mission. In the morning though it was just another intersection with lamp posts covered in up-coming concert posters for me to consider and then not attend.
The base of Burrard was where the hill flattened out to sea level. There is a large park-type area with a shitty fountain. In the spring this park had cherry blossoms kicking some sweet visual ass. The only people I ever saw in the park though were homeless folk nestled under rotting sleeping bags and layers of cardboard. It was a pretty big, open area but was not any place you want to go for a picnic or dog-walk or frisbee tournament. Behind it was the saddest looking Canadian Tire I ever saw. I don't think it was even a Canadian Tire anymore during my last life in Vancouver. The building is so sad that I have no idea what it housed other than a sports store of some kind.
On the other side of the street was a fantastic looking military armory that I assume is now used to host expensive weddings. This was next to the beer plant. If I drank beer I'd be able to tell you if it was Molson or Labbatt without looking it up but I can't... Molson.
Next post I'll continue on up the bridge and into the cities core. The photos downtown will be much more interesting I'm sure. I think after I finish this walk I'm going to do a tour-by-memory of Portland. It's been a while.
Songs of the week, they kind of sound like Broadway if you play them in order:
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