ANGER

I went to a rock show tonite, I guess that’s what you’d call it anyway. The second band that played—and the last band I would be willing to sit thru, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back if you will—was one of these “noise” bands. A more accurate term however is post-music. It brought to mind the scene in “The Royal Tanenbaums” when Royal has to sit thru Margot’s play and when she asks him what he thought of it, he says, “what play? It was just a bunch of kids in animal costumes.” So that’s essentially how the young people of today make me feel; I’m like an estranged philistine with no soul and no willingness to humor people’s egotistical and childish desire to be artists. On the subject of Wes Anderson, I was on a 13 hour long bus ride the other day and this man who quite resembled Mr. Anderson got on the bus about 8 hours in. The rest of us who’d been together for hours at this point had grown quite accustomed to each other --at least in a superficial sort of way-- when this man and several other people got on the bus effectively filling up all the seats. My first feeling of revulsion with this man was aroused when he found himself without a place to sit. There was a girl sitting in front of me who’d fallen asleep and thusly was taking up two seats. The Wes Anderson look-alike stood above her and kind of looked around at the rest of us so as to suggest we were all complicit in this woman’s unforgivable rudeness. He then proceeded to slap her chair in the weirdest most aggressively meek manner. She woke up and drowsily moved for him to sit down. His equally irritating wife sat across the aisle from him reading a tiny little bible in the most theatrical way imaginable, it was after all Easter Sunday and by god none of us were going to be afforded the luxury of forgetting that boring fact on this woman’s watch. This is when it gets really interesting, at all the previous stops the passengers had been allowed to get off the bus to stretch their legs, have a cigarette and take a shit or whatever but, at this stop we were asked to please remain seated. I guess this didn’t go over very well with this one rather weatherworn woman (she actually looked like she may have at one time been a man) it would seem that this woman’s desire for a cigarette had reached calamitous proportions and she disappeared into the washroom to have a few quick puffs. Before you could blink, the man who looked like Wes Anderson had jumped out of his seat and was marching to the front of the bus to report this woman’s outrageous audacity. The bus driver who, I must admit I’d also already formed negative opinions about, promptly came to the back of the bus and demanded that the woman vacate the premises. In a typical Canadian way nobody stood up for this woman. Nobody took it upon themselves to say, “ya know, it’s not that big a deal. Are we really gonna desert this woman in the middle of nowhere ‘cuz she made a stupid mistake?” Nope, there wasn’t a single word of protest from any of us as this woman thrashed her way to the front of the bus and out onto the lonely streets of Chiliwack. I was ashamed of myself and for the rest of the trip I had violent thoughts about the snitch and his idiot wife.