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.
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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: