A nice rest from the drudgery chronicles.

I’ve been meaning to post on this thing for a while now and now seems like a weird time because my best friend has taken over this place with his weird stories of misery and despair.   I had planned on writing an essay on Andie MacDowel’s character, Rita, from “Ground Hog Day.”  “Ground Hog Day” is my favorite movie and I’m always realizing new things about it.  It’s the perfect redemption story and it’s the opportunity every good person deserves but never gets.  One of the things that interests me about Rita is her purpose in the story requires we only know certain things about her.   If we knew all about her life and her baggage we’d have a harder time falling in love with her and we need to believe she’s perfect to make Phil Connors’ character arc work.  But, if she’s so great then how come she’s alone at 35?  Anyway, this was going to be the premise for my essay but just writing it out makes me realize I probably couldn’t have squeezed as much good stuff out of it as I had hoped, it’s pretty thin really.  Sometimes I wish I’d studied something more substantial in school.  

Moving along, I’ve been really slammed at work lately and on my walk home today I was considering my options for the evening.  Right when I’d settled on going home, jumping on the elliptical machine and then making myself a nice spaghetti dinner, I felt the seductive pull of Tinseltown.  I dipped in there, bought my ticket for a film that will remain nameless and sat down in the dark empty theater.   There was still thirty five minutes until the movie was supposed to start so I decided to call the twenty year old girl who’d been texting me all day.  She didn’t answer but promptly texted me back to say she couldn’t talk because she was at work.  Friendships with young people are not impossible but they are strange.  Especially once you get over your initial desire to have sex with said young people.  I then decided to call the girl from work who I was totally infatuated with for a time and—let’s be honest—most probably still am.  We talked about what she’d made for dinner and what a winner of a film “Disney’s Robin Hood” is.  Nothing really all that noteworthy came up in conversation, but what did happen, was my kindred spirit entered the scene when I was on the phone.  We made eye contact and smiled.  I like to think the subtext of the smile was a tacit understanding that we were very cultured and savvy people who happened to share a curiosity about things society deems low art(formulaic mainstream comedies starring Zac Efron for example).   I promptly got off the phone with my work crush and started manufacturing a real longing for this mysterious new stranger sitting two rows in front of me.  She had wild curly hair and she was reading, that’s right folks a real book! 

 After the movie ended--it’s good by the way, if you’ve figured out what it is and you’re on the fence about seeing it—I briefly tried to think of a way to talk to my new passing fancy.  I got a better look at her in the hall though and noticed she was a bit younger than I’d initially thought.  This is when my fantasy about her being a bookish eccentric with an interest in bogus movies started to disintegrate.  From the look of her she appeared to be more the kind to have a school girl crush on Zac Efron than my initial deduction that she was either a columnist for a magazine or an aspiring screenwriter.   That said, she was still cute and she still had smiled at me earlier.  Lost in introspection for a moment I lost sight of her and thought, oh well, I had the wrong idea about her anyway.  However, when I stepped outside our paths once again crossed.  It would seem we were awkwardly walking in the same direction.  I crossed the street to get away from her for fear that she’d think not only was I following her home but that I’d been stalking her all day.  We were keeping a similar pace and just when I thought she was going to go a different direction than me, she continued right along with me toward the Cambie street bridge.  Now it was getting weird, so I decided to cross the street and talk to her because watching dumb romantic comedies turns you into a bit of a dreamy retard when it comes to certain things.  

An average looking man was talking to himself when I got on the bus today. He was half yelling, "I wouldn't have left it in there," as I sat down, and then he trailed off. A block or two later he said the same thing, and then later again he added, "Because I was afraid something like that was going to happen." As I was getting off he said, "The Devil, he looked just like him. I don't know what it was about him..." It was sunny and hot and the corner of Main and Hastings was in pandemonium.

On the way home the intersection was clogged with fire trucks, police wagons and ambulances. A man rode by on a bicycle wearing another bicycle around his neck. Someone walked out into traffic to beg for change with a paper Starbucks cup. When the first car he came to refused him he made off crying in a high pitched squeal like a very small child. A man picking up cigarette butts on the other side of the street stepped around him like he didn't even notice. Then a man with no legs below the top of the knees pushed himself past in a battered wheel chair, singing to himself. On the bus I sat across from a muscle man who loudly ordered around his girlfriend while she stood near by holding bags of groceries. When she got a seat next to me he interrogated her across the aisle about the day she'd had registering for a recovery program like he knew all the answers. Then a man got on with a large, broad nose oozing puss and blood like it had been boiled and pressed through a metal sieve up to the hilt of his nostrils and no further. Beside the muscle bound man, there was an enormous homeless person hugging a bundle of blankets who had been yelling periodically that the bus ride was taking too long. When the man with the melting nose passed down the aisle between us he yelled, "JESUS! FUCK!" At the next stop a man with one leg was waiting. When the man with the blankets heard the beeping of the wheelchair ramp unfolding he yelled again, "Oh CHRRRIIIST! FUCK!"

I got on the bus at 11:30 this morning. A man covered in black dirt got on and fell asleep on the row of chairs in front of me. When I was changing buses at the corner I passed a man who asked me, "Up or down?" Twenty feet behind him two police officers had someone cornered against the fence of the Carnegie Center's courtyard and were casually interrogating him. As I approached I head the man say, "OK, I am mentally unstable right now but..."

On the way home I decided to walk to a farther bus stop up Hastings St. On the way I passed a man coming in the other direction, praying to God in Farsi, in a terrified, blubbering panic. Then I passed a man walking very angrily with his head down, muttering to himself. His only audible words were, "You FUCK... FUCKING... FUCKING... I'll FUCKING... tell me to FUCKING..." Then I walked by a man passed out in a doorway beside a fresh bag of green grapes. He was reclined like the Venus of Urbino with one palm upturned and a needed sticking out of his arm.

I got on the bus at noon today and sat across from a young man in his early twenties who looked like he hadn't slept. He had a tattoo from his wrist to his elbow of a tall, narrow cabinet with a lot of shelves, and the shelves were filled of objects. I made out a bunch of bananas, a free mason symbol, a heart and waves. Then he picked up his back pack, pulled out a can of Colt 45, opened it and began drinking. Through the window behind him, I saw as we passed a man in handcuffs being talked to by three police officers. He was standing on the curb with his back to the police car and was facing a crowd of ten or fifteen of his peers. They were all seated on a low cement wall, looking on with little interest and talking amongst themselves. None of them looked to be in as good health or were dressed as nicely as the man under arrest. Further down the street we passed a very skinny woman in a mini skirt and pink tank top carrying three dripping ice cream cones and talking to her self. I changed buses at Main and Hastings. There was a large crowd of people there hanging out in the shade of two tall trees that grow out of the fenced in courtyard of the Carnegie Center. Two men seated on the side walk in different parts of the shade were smoking crack, and a woman sitting in the sun on the sidewalk was drinking from a bottle of Wiser's. Another man was knelt over a newspaper anxiously scribbling down numbers and symbols and scratching the sores on his face. When the bus came a man with a giant head of frizzy hair escorted a prostitute on board with him. At the next bus stop about 20 Chinese seniors got on board and a man standing behind me said, "You must feel like a giant eh?" When I turned around to meet him he had barbed wire tattooed around his neck and a red and black Iron Cross tattooed over his adam's apple.

On the way home I passed a short man with black and gray hair wearing a trench coat and large framed glasses with red lenses in them. His face was small and gaunt and he had stuffed in his mouth a rotten upper denture which was twice too big for him and forced his jaw open as it stuck out. Beside him a woman was on her hands and knees poking around in the cracks of the pavement with a stick. She was wearing a jean mini skirt and a sparkled halter top. She looked like she weighed less than 80 pounds. At the bus stop I noticed the old couple next to me were smoking a joint. The woman saw me looking as I stepped onto the bus and said, "You must be craving eh?" and started laughing. At the back of the bus three hardened looking people were talking loudly amongst themselves and teasing a friend who stood by the doors with her back to them. When they all got off the bus together the larger of the two men cornered the woman against a wall as the bus pulled out of sight.

I followed a man and a prostitute to the bus stop this morning. They were running very heavily and very slowly, arguing with each other, no bus in sight. When I caught up to them she was seated in his lap on the bus stop bench and they were talking about the money they were going to get that day. When the bus came I stood by the back door while a short man next to me repeated, "You think you're pretty strong". I could hear him clearly but it was crowded and I was wearing headphones so I pretended I couldn't. I got off at the corner of Main and Hastings to change buses. As I was approaching the bus stop I looked up to find a grey haired man facing me in the middle of the sidewalk, smoking a crack pipe. Behind him, blocking the door to the bus, a man with cerebral palsy was laying prostrate in a big, black relining electric wheel chair, wearing only a diaper and a stained white t-shirt. His helper was smoking a cigarette and didn't mind that his client was in the way, so when the bus came we all squeezed past his head while he looked up at us.

On the way home I got off the bus at Main and Hastings. A man was slumped forward on the bus stop bench with a line of drool hanging off the end of his cigarette. I waited for my bus on the opposite corner while a man sat on the side walk, swaying back and forth with his head between his knees and dangling a big cross between his ankles. A woman came out of the adjacent building and started telling him that she finally dumped her boyfriend, but he didn't respond. When the bus came I stood beside a woman with what looked like third degree burns running across her head from ear to ear in a perfectly straight, three inch wide stripe. A big puff of hair rose off the front of her head and at the back it was pulled tight into a bun. She lay sideways in a clean floral print dress, resting her head on the back of the seat and sighing loudly the rest of the way home.

Last night I went to this metal show and this hot metal girl approached me before the headlining band and she was all like, "are you ready to rock out with your cock out?"  along with some other typically metal pleasantries.  She seemed quite drunk and then she started hugging me and stuff which was exciting to put it lightly.  Then, much to my sadness, she looks up at me and says,  "oh my god,  I thought you were somebody else."  This is my life.