the smizz

Poo Font returns. It is now a book

2011-05-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

You thought you had scrubbed it clean from the porcelain rim of your memory banks, but no - Poo Font makes an explosive return!

Yes, Arne Gutmann's masterpiece of typography has now been included in a self-published book.

All 26 letters of the alphabet in their original form are featured in all its excremental glory in Gutmann's debut book. B is for Book is totally disgusting and ready for inclusion in your personal library.

"I had always dreamt that I would (make a book) once I finished the font," he says. "I saw one of the features at the bottom of iPhoto there and thought, this is just for me."

For those out of the loop, Poo Font is a font made from poo. Gutmann discovered one day, 20 years ago, that he had a particular knack for producing fully formed letters of the alphabet thanks to a "really good" digestive system. Over the next two decades, he photographed each digestive offering with the intention of creating a complete font. As of March, that goal was achieved.

"(My wife) was getting kind of bored with it but now she sees that it's almost kind of a movement and we have to keep the train running...so to speak," he says.

He's found through Google and Twitter searches that people are talking about his project but it has yet to go viral.

He has big plans for his little book. The three-by-2.4 inch book is merely for promotion, and Gutmann says plans are already underway for an expanded, coffee-table book-sized format that will include original photographs of the letters, the black and white true font, the punctuation and brief write-ups for each one. He plans to call it The Red Flag Book after a Seinfeld episode where George is forced to buy an expensive art book after taking it into a bookstore bathroom. He hopes to have it completed by the end of the month.

Gutmann's font, while disturbing, is a certain type of genius - not in the work itself but in the human reactions to it. Showing the book to people is an experiment in psychology where most react with utter disgust and frank curiosity. B is for Book proves that humans, as decent as they claim to be, will always be attracted to the weird and repulsive.

While some people have raised skepticism that Gutmann's letters have been doctored or manipulated, he claims that what you see is exactly as he found it.

"The only reason some of them look obscure is because the bowl of the toilet obscures the full amount, so I have to cut that off (with Photoshop) and use what's there," he says.

Gross.

Eager Gutmann fans can purchase B is for Book for $20 through Gutmann's website, www.poofont.com. Who knows? It could be a collector's item one day.

And no, sorry folks, the book is not a scratch and sniff.

Who is Cameron Chu?

2011-05-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

It's a Friday night and Cameron Chu, the Bearfoot Bistro's resident pianist, is making love to his piano.

Wait...no, no. Get your mind out of the gutter. Let's say he's making that piano love. Better? The piano loves the room, with sweet, sweet jazz, rolling through the restaurant like a leaf riding on the wind. The patrons - they sit at their tables, enjoying their wine, yakking at their wives, boyfriends, whatever. Few of them, if any, are paying any direct attention to this amorous piano but once Chu lifts his fingers from the keys, there's a noticeable shift in ambiance. It leaves a void to be filled by recorded jazz numbers playing over the P.A.

It's not the same thing at all. Like all professional musicians, Chu knows how to command a room. A musician needs a certain kind of emotional intelligence, or instinct, to feel if the room is, y'know, "happening." Chu is always looking around.

"Every gig is different," he says. "If you want to stay working, you just have to be flexible. What I do here, I won't necessarily do somewhere else."

Chu's repertoire is massive - it's too big to even put a number on how many pieces he knows by heart. He plays show, swing, jazz, pop, reggae and top 40. He could play heavy metal if it were necessary but would prefer not to. The man is a professional musician win the purest sense - classically trained, astute and skeptical of modern pop.

"Regardless of what the gig is, you have got to be looking around, even if you're on stage," he says. "A lot of performers now, they have a set list and that's it. But a lot of the older performers, they had a set list but they'd watch the crowd. That set list gets changed on the fly."

Born and raised in Vancouver he studied - surprise! - piano music at the Vancouver Academy of Music. After completing that program, he earned a degree in biology at UBC but the ivory keys kept on a-callin'. He's played in dozens of bands over the years and has met some of the great jazz musicians: Ray Brown, for one, would steal his bass amp, preferring Chu's to his own. That was all part of travelling with a band - the circles are small and all the players travel along a circuit. Chu says great connections are made during layovers.

But Chu never warmed up to the travelling thing. He says he never felt settled. He never had the time to practice properly, so he eventually settled in Whistler, where he'd played in the 1980s. Opportunity presented itself in the form of a promising new restaurant - the Bearfoot Bistro. Fifteen years later, he's one of the restaurant's original team members.

And tonight, well, tonight seems like a good night. He's feeling a bit playful.

"I'm playing a bit more aggressive tonight," he says.

Righto, but...wait....what? In what sense? He's not rolling out Metallica tunes here. His fingers flaying those keys, heating the room with his warm, supple jazz can hardly be described as particularly aggressive...can it?

He nods. "It's a little bit quick paced. The last tune was a bit quick for this time. Normally I would save that for later in the night. Sometimes you just have to see what the room's going to do."

It's taken hard work, a lot of years - not to mention a whole lot of practicing - to get where he is. He practices three to four hours, every day.

"You need to master your instrument," he says. "Before you even get into the musicianship, you need to master your instrument. You should be commanding your instrument, not the other way around. You have to own the guitar you should be able to make that guitar talk. That guitar should not make you struggle."

The instrument - like the camera for a photographer, like the brush for the painter - should be an extension of the fingers. The way Chu manipulates those keys - So clean! So smooth! - It's a wonder Chu isn't playing some prominent jazz bar in Manhattan.

He could have gone to New York. The opportunity is always there. He knows plenty of people there but there's something about Whistler that a New York, a London, even a Vancouver can never provide. Call it quality of life. Call it a measure of security that a talented jazz musician, only one of a handful in town, can work on the regular. He's earned his reputation in town.

It's why the Bearfoot, an internationally recognized fine dining restaurant, calls him week after week. It's why his name appears in the music listings of this paper. It's why he's worth doing a story on. The man is worth the price of dinner at least.

A favourable truth

2011-05-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

Hand it to Al Gore for inspiring a generation of environmental films that shame humanity into re-thinking our impacts on the planet. While it's (sort of?) working, An Inconvenient Truth and its dreary counterparts can be a depressing viewing experience.

Which makes Puppet State Theatre Company's adaptation of The Man Who Planted Trees all the more appealing in this day of heightened environmental awareness. Add the fact that the story is told through puppetry and you have yourself a different kind of tale.

"It's a positive environmental story, it's not the type of story that makes you feel bad. It's not doom-laden," says Richard Medrington, founder of and performer in Puppet State.

Jean Giono first published his tale of a tree-planting shepherd who brings a deserted valley back to life in 1953, under its original title, The Man Who Planted Hope and Reaped Happiness. In 1987, it was adapted as an animated short and won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Medrington, a seasoned puppeteer, discovered the story in 2005 and adapted it to the stage with his colleague, Rick Conte. They used the shepherd's dog as the narrator, cutting out the anonymous man used in Giono's original, to round out the drama with humour and improvisation.

"We felt that it was a story that needed to be told and we were looking for a new show to do," Medrington says.

For the last five years, Medrington and Conte have taken the show to cities around the world, garnering rave reviews. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote in a review last November, "The language and cadence of the show is pitched at adults; there's no talking down to the audience."

In those five years, environmental awareness has increased in the Western world and as a result, Medrington says he has noticed shifts in audience appreciation for The Man Who Planted Trees, most notably from the adults.

"People are just very moved by it sometimes. People stand with tears at the end of it. (They) say so afterward, that they were crying," Medrington says.

He adds, "I think it's an extraordinary story that (Giono) wrote because it's so simple, but it had layers of meaning to it. I keep having revelations to it while I'm doing the show... and it's not always specifically environmental things that I get out of it, it's just general life lessons."

Medrington says that humour plays a big role in carrying the play, which might otherwise buckle under the weight of its own message. The dog is used to lighten the load.

"Any kind of performance where you press the same button over and over again, people get weary," Medrington says. "If it's hitting the same area of the human brain, you just get tired. You've got to have variety."

And variety it has. They use that to shape the story's dimensions while using sound effects and smells, such as with lavender floating into the audience. Medrington says he wants to give as much variety in the performance as possible, so nothing goes on for too long.

"We're still striving to get it right. We've probably done it nearly 1,500 times now and it's always different, the audience is always different, new things come and old things leave and come back again. We try to keep it fresh. That's the challenge for us as performers, having done it so often," he says.

Pray for a casino and maybe it'll come

2011-05-19T14:29:00.001-07:00

A casino! In Whistler? What a novel idea.

There has been absolutely no talk about it from town planners, at least not that the public has heard, and any time the topic comes up in conversation people are vehemently opposed to the idea.

The main argument is that it doesn't fit the image that Whistler has created for itself - but what about it doesn't fit?

Whistler is a tourist mill and if we want to keep the turnstiles active there needs to be every variety of experience attracting visitors. This needs to extend beyond just family experiences. As Las Vegas knows all too well, families don't bring in the dollars.

That's not to say Whistler should become Sin City North in order to thrive, but it needs to start thinking outside of family-friendly-only programming. Whistler at present does not provide a whole lot for adults to do after dinner, except for nightclubbing, an activity that, on the whole, loses its appeal a) after one or two nights in a row and b) once people turn 30. Whistler is actually kind of boring. If it wants to thrive, it needs to cast its net much wider.

A casino is a good place to start because it's not just a casino - it's a restaurant, it's a bar, it's a theatre. With a new venue will come increased programming and, depending on the success of the casino, that programming could be more world-class on a more regular basis than this town currently provides. A casino is, in short, is a people-attracting, entertainment-compounding moneymaker.

In British Columbia, host local governments earn 10 per cent of a casino's revenue. In the 2009/10 year, the provincial government distributed $81.9 million to these communities. Between July 1999 and March 31, 2011, Penticton earned over $21 million. Nanaimo earned over $32 million in that same period. Prince George - $24 million-plus. Richmond - $93 million. Fort St. John - over $2 million, and that's in a very remote location in B.C.'s north.

Now that Canada has approved destination status in China, Whistler has the opportunity to pull in - and profit from - a new type of tourist coming to Canada, but right now the town has very little to keep Chinese tourists in Whistler for more than a day. They get off the bus, they take some pictures, they get on the bus and go back to the city. And the Chinese - they love to gamble. Macau, located on the southern tip of China, is the biggest and most successful gambling destination in the world, pulling in revenues of $24 billion in 2010 - way above Las Vegas. Whistler, and indeed Canada, needs a very good reason for Chinese tourists to spend their coin across the ocean. Vancouver city council, in its rejection last month of a massive casino along False Creek, aborted a potentially massive cash cow.

Whistler's strongest appeal right now is the regional market, but it's completely missing the people who don't care about the great outdoors. Metro Vancouver residents have their own "great outdoors" to appreciate. They need other reasons to come up.

There would be a definite dark side. Casinos can bring out in a community a certain desperation that might not otherwise exist. The underbelly of Whistler may flop over topside. But try as we might, Whistler cannot stave the ugliness off forever. It's the nature of growing up. The hardships, they breed evils. Where there's a yin, there's a yang. How we confront and deal with those evils will determine what sort of presence it has in the community. Whistler is fortunate in that it's still very young in 2011, with over a century of mistakes in urban planning to learn from.

We can't have it both ways. If we want tourists to come, we need to give them every reason to make the hour and a half trek from Vancouver. The mountains are good enough for the people who live here but as we now know, they're not good enough for everyone else.

It's astonishing that, even in a global recession, Whistler has attracted millions of people based on its outdoor offerings alone. But it's not enough. It never has been enough and that's what the Cultural Tourism Development Strategy is about. Building a casino could be a part of that strategy. It's time to start thinking about what the town needs to maximize its financial successes.

If Jesus were food no one would be fat

2011-04-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in many a man's life when he must come to terms with his belly. It comes sooner for some, but save the Herculeses among us, many of us will be spilling over the belt loops eventually. Accepting this can be psychologically crippling for those emerging from the flat-bellied days of youth as we grip the bulge with both hands while standing shirtless before the bathroom mirror asking, "Why, oh Lord, why?"

One could blame the lack of exercise or all the hours sitting on the chesterfield watching My Name is Earl re-runs, but the true terror is a bad diet. Poor nutrition is not just a personal problem but a systemic cultural one where processed food is still widely accepted by a society still gripped by convenience over perfect health. While we are collectively moving away from a fast food nation, the progress is slow and may never be eradicated. Mars Bars will remain readily available in vending machines and not a single child north of the Rio Grande River will ever give a good goddamn about quinoa.

But they should. Already considered the "miracle grain" by several prominent book publishers, quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) is a gluten-free protein and a nutritious substitute for rice, potato and pasta - the culinary cornerstones of many cultures. The problem is that when prepared, quinoa has all the flare of a Gap cardigan sweater and no amount of journalistic pandering will convince the masses to convert once they have actually tasted it.

That is, unless Jesus gets involved. Our Lord and Saviour, presumably ready any day now to launch his return to this godless planet, must consider returning in the form of a vaguely popular chenopodium. Yes, quinoa should be the Second Coming of Christ.

If God can take the human form of His only begotten son and ascend back into heaven three days after dying, He can return as anything he wants. He can return as a steaming pile of cow dung if He so desires, but of course that would make very little sense.

It'd be foolish for Jesus to return to Earth as a human. He tried that once and look what happened. His initial mission was flawed by his attempts to target mankind's intellect. All the parables and subversive philosophies earned Him a crucifixion and a legacy of martyrdom followed by Evangelicalism. Yes, He has earned a reputation as one of humanity's most important people ever, but His message of radical personal and social transformation has been muddled by nearly 2000 years of worship and idolization, negating his central argument that the transformative power of love for all mankind is a real possibility. Popularity was never His intention but once we picked up on His appealing ideas, humanity went all Hollywood on His legacy.

What Jesus now needs to realize, if He hasn't already, is that mankind needs a more subliminal mechanism by which to be reached. Food is the gasoline of our being. It is what fuels us and our dismal relationship with it has caused serious problems worldwide. We don't need Jesus' love transmitted through paradigm-rattling rhetoric, we need it to worm its way through our digestive tracts and carried through our blood streams and right out to our appendages. Like a pill.

Quinoa is possibly the best vehicle for this global distribution. It was considered a sacred grain by the Incas, who as we all know have always been God's chosen people. Quinoa's versatility means that the less health-conscious among us can load it on their cheeseburgers without complaint and its blandness won't offend the Methodists.

So on the anniversary this Sunday of our Lord and Saviour's ascension into heaven, think about the benefits of His return as the miracle grain of quinoa. Consider the benefits that His Holiness, circling through your body, can have on your well-being. From here, we can one day be united as one through a common love of Jesus-cum-quinoa.

Keep an open mind here - radical ideas, as disturbing as they may be, should always be considered before they are dismissed. This newfound compassion for others will save us from war, not to mention diabetes, heart disease, and that ever-expanding flab at the centre of our torso, pushing out every day, inch by inch.

The purpose of death must be to live, or something similarly obvious

2011-03-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

I was sucking on a quarter. It caught a ride with my saliva and sailed down my throat. I was nine, or something. Following the panic incited by my choking noises, my sitter's husband came to the rescue, hitting me square between the shoulder blades and ejecting the coin. I picked it up and probably spent it in some jellybeans. Later that week, I was sucking on a loony and the same thing happened.

The fact that I almost died twice within a week meant very little to me then. Death for us as children was an unidentifiable concept because we had a limited understanding of the nature of mortality. Once we grew older and more aware of our role in the universe, then the gravity of such matters began to settle. For a child, choking on quarters is the pinnacle of hilarity.

Mathew certainly found it funny. He'd use it as his go-to potshot for months afterward. We'd been best friends for a couple of years by then and so were taking the piss out of each on the regular. We lived 10 houses apart in those days and would spend most afternoons ignoring our homework and exploring the forests surrounding the neighbourhood instead.

We'd pretend we were a pair of gumshoeing movie stars named Joshua and Michael who wore earrings in our left lobes because in real life our parents wouldn't allow such fashion. No, in real life we were a pair of nine-year-old dweebs toiling in the fleeting heedlessness of pre-adolescence, united by a close proximity and a fondness for spandex bicycle shorts.

Mathew died when we were 12 and I still don't know how. My parents said it was an accident while the kids that knew him said and continue to say that the cause was more deliberate. The facts don't matter to me now and they certainly didn't then. He was gone, is gone, will be gone and that has always been enough for me to deal with.

Naturally, I cried myself to sleep every night for a week or so, maybe a month, while maintaining absolute composure during the day. Everything seemed the same on the surface - I was still ignoring my homework, still cultivating a deep love of music that may have been accelerated by the loss of a friend. It happened at a time when most kids are coming into awareness and the sudden death of someone so close and so young was a rude and sinister eye opener. Traumas like that are like a boulder splashing in a pond. The bigger the stone, the bigger the splash and the longer it takes for the ripples to settle before all is calm and the reflection is what it was.

It took about 15 years for the complexity of that event to be fully understood. I graduated from an almost crippling fear in my teens of other people dying, to a complete indifference toward my own mortality, to an absolute certainty in my early to mid-twenties that death was lurking around every corner.

But as the great sage Roseanne Barr once said, "If you spend all your time worrying about dying, living isn't going to be very much fun," and I spent a lot of effort between shifts and between classes finding ways to settle what had been a lengthy rippling in the pond. Eventually, over a series of trips both geographical and psychotropic, through the comforts of music and literature, through conversations with family and strangers alike, and eventually escaping the city life, I found the perspective I had been fighting for. Finding contentment is difficult work and don't let anyone tell you any different.

The final step, of course, happened while in Whistler, while chewing on a piece of over-cooked steak. The piece was a little too big but I'm careless by nature so I ate it anyway. The meat cube slid on a stream of saliva much like an incident 17 years previous, and into my throat. After pulling the lodged meat from throat with my left hand, I sat panting at the table, wondering what it would have looked like for my roommates to find my corpse on the floor and a steak on the table.

I laughed then - a short, refreshing laugh while contemplating for the first time without fear what it would have felt like if the steak had succeeded in killing me.

Move over Helvetica...

2011-02-16T14:34:00.000-08:00

This is a poo font. It is a font made from poo.

The X, the R, the S - nothing was manipulated. Arne Gutmann simply sat on the can as you or I do when we go about our business and voila! A perfectly formed "A."

"Dude, everybody's got magic," Gutmann said. "I have pretty good digestive system. Everybody's got magic, man."

One day, about 20 years ago, he was about to flush at his home in Toronto when he took a peek - as so many of us do - and discovered a letter floating in the water.

"I was impressed," he said. "I grabbed my camera and took a picture. And then, I don't know, a couple of weeks or a couple of months later, I got another one. I was like, 'Dude, this is wild.'"

He doesn't recall what that first letter was but it stirred something within him. An idea was fermenting. A photographer by trade (he's active in the Whistler scene, curating local arts exhibits and sitting on the board for the Point) his passion has always laid in the obscure. So whenever a new letter would drop, he'd keep a record of it. It has had nothing to do with a fecal fascination - he claims he has never had one - but he just "keeps stuff." Over time, he decided to make something of all the letters and by using Photoshop to grayscale the images of his excrement he created an entire alphabet. It's now available for purchase at www.poofont.com

"I have so many (letters), man - like the alphabet five times over but in different variations. They're not all the same," he said.

He's clearly amused when showing the raw images of his turds. While they are all quite horrific, they're also uncanny. That the human body can produce waste in the alphabet form is a perverted wonder and unless you see the original images - of which there is no rush, trust - you'll never see the true magic behind the letter "R" or the number "4."

Nothing like this has ever been created before. There are plenty of poo-based fonts, characters and images but most of them are hand drawn. An alphabet plopped out letter by letter over the years...well Gutmann's on the leading edge. No one has paid to use the font yet, and aside from the above headline and a few X's (a trademark, of sorts) given to a few friends it has yet to be used in the public.

People have been talking about it though to gauge their reactions is to gauge the vitality of the font as a work of art. Reactions lie somewhere between revulsion and fascination, often at both extremes and often at the same time.

"It's a natural thing. It's a natural bodily function," he said. "We're all aware of it... but it's also a repulsive thing too."

Gutmann is hardly the first artist to use bodily fluids as a vehicle for artistic expression. Among others, Italian artist Piero Manconi once sold one-ounce tin cans of his feces, complete with a label, in a collection known as "Merda d'artista" ("Artist's shit"). They didn't sell well at first but in 2007 a single can fetch 124,000 euros.

Like Manconi, Gutmann had an idea, and like every artist is compelled to do, he took the idea and executed it. As many artists will testify, the art is not always a biographical assessment of the artist as a whole.

"People are like, 'You're obsessed! You're obsessed!'" Gutmann said." I'm not obsessed, man, it's just a thing, you know? It's my magic and I've realized it and I have tried to capitalize on it," he said.

Gutmann plans to self-publish publish a book featuring all the letters, which include outtakes for letters that didn't make it, as well as original images to compare to the finished product.

Interested?

We thought so.

The Valentine's Day love story you've been waiting for

2011-02-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

My first kiss was a peck on the lips of the girl I had been in love with for four or five months. We kissed on a dare made by our mutual friend, Suzie. It was innocent enough, simple enough - a brief peck and that was it. Kaily was smiling about it. For her, it was not a big deal.

She had a husband, see, and had been kissing him and holding hands with him throughout the fall. She had been married the month before in a wedding ceremony at the school yard baseball diamond, where she and her fiancée, Edward, a four-foot Filipino with a lustrous crop of jet-black hair I could never live up to, exchanged rings made of twist ties.

Because I didn't have a date I was not welcome to the ceremony and had to watch my love given away to another man atop some monkey bars located across the field with the few other 12-year-old rejects barred from the celebration, listening as the wind carried the wedding party's giggles in our direction.

A month later, Kaily, Suzie and myself were playing truth or dare. I had smoked my very first cigarette an hour or so before and my mouth tasted like the insole of a running shoe. I was self-conscious about the smell but as Kaily leaned in closer I noticed she reeked like cigarettes, too. This was a little comforting but as she leaned her face toward mine, I became a radiator of human heat. My heart was beating too fast and I thought this is the end. My chest is going to explode in a bloody mess all over my love.

But I leaned ever closer, my left eye shut tight and my right eye open a crack to view with limited visibility Kaily's puckered, wrinkled mouth inch toward mine. And we pecked and it was done.

Soon after that, Suzie and Kaily fellated their boyfriends. Suzie had passed a note around the classroom about the incident and later threw it away in the class trashcan. For some reason, our teacher dug it out of the bin and a controversy was born upon discovering the debauched behaviour of cigarette-smoking seventh graders trading after-school sexual favours in family living rooms. It was a big deal around the classroom and I'm certain it shook the more innocent-minded students out of their naiveté. It certainly did mine. I had no concept of such behaviour, and the thought of having someone's mouth...y'know, down there was absurd and unappealing.

Because this was a Catholic elementary school, any indecent behaviour was magnified ten-fold and I'd find out later this was one of - if not the -first time St. Paul's Catholic Elementary School had to deal with issues of student sexuality.

I'd also find out later through some friends that during this same period, at a public elementary school across the road, oral sex was akin to eating peppermints. Seventh-graders were taking regular hits of LSD and having sex in the bushes lining the playground. Indecent behaviour was rampant around this part of Richmond, British Columbia, and was a vital sign that Canada's youth were learning the methods of grown-up fun at a far younger age than their parents.

It seems strange to me, even now, that anybody in the seventh grade was even contemplating sex. I had only a vague sense of what it implied and what it looked like. It was something dark and murky and sounded like sheets rustling from behind bedroom walls. I thought ejaculate was yellow, like urine, and the prospect of sexual intercourse seemed to me as ludicrous as navigating my own way across the Pacific Ocean.

But this single event had yanked me from my carefully coddled universe of toy cars and Goosebumps novels into a more carnal reality of human sexuality. There was suddenly a realm of experience that existed beyond what Saturday morning cartoons were describing. The muffled rustling behind bedroom walls now had some clear visuals. It was alluring yet alarming, and bewildering that I had remained so ignorant of these primal desires while kids that I knew - that I talked with and shared granola bars, traded baseball cards with - were acting out their hormonal urges after school while their parents were away at work.

The following year - the first year of high school, when sex was still perplexing but the rite of masturbation had clarified some of its mysteries -a girl from my old seventh grade class admitted she wanted me to be her boyfriend, so she could "do it" with me.

"Would you have said yes?" she said.

"Probably not," I said.

I made up some nonsense about being in love with someone else, but the truth was I was too awkward to think about even kissing a girl. It would take several more years before the buds of this hormonal human would blossom into something, um, more fully functioning, but at this moment I was still holding on to that single moment one year before when ignorant innocence was still my reality and a pair of puckered, shriveled lips were enough to make my head explode.

I left that conversation and walked on home, wondering if I could catch the last half of Animaniacs.

Ten ways to a good roommate

2011-01-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

By Stephen Smysnuik

Living with roommates is a bummer because it generally means having to live with people we can't sleep with. Few people will readily resign to the deficiencies humans are known for if sex isn't available as a reward for putting up with them.

So, yeah, living with people is a bummer. In order to ease the burden I've spent hours poring over ancient texts relating to home-sharing, from Mayan scheduling for taking out the garbage to Roman philosophies on how to deal with foul-smelling roommates. It's true.

This painstaking research has been to provide you, the Good People of Whistler, with 10 rules to live by that will make you not only a decent person to live with but, by extension, a decent human being.

1) Do the dishes: This is the cardinal rule. If there's one thing that breeds resentment in roommates, it's letting the dishes stack in the sink. They're crusted with

food, people! They attract flies in the summer and cause smells that no human

paying $775 per month should have to live with. Wash your dishes as soon as you're finished with them. If you're too lazy to do this one simple task, well, maybe you shouldn't exist.

2) No parties on a school night: We all like the occasional 2 a.m. living-room dance party but it's unfair to subject your roommates to this behaviour if they have to work in the morning. Friday nights/nights of mutual days off are fine - that's the cross we bear for having to live with people. But on a Tuesday night? With five to eight other people carrying on? With Kool and the Gang soundtracking the shenanigans? Not cool.

3) No loud sex: This will be a tough rule to follow for all the Don Juans in town but it's important to test pre-coitus just how thin your walls are. Sound will travel to other rooms and other people will be subjected to your impassioned noise making. This is awkward for everyone concerned, especially the lonely.

4) Respect the bathroom: It gets very crowded in there, meaning a lot of grit and grime (at the very least, if you're lucky) very quickly. This is typically an unpleasant experience for everyone concerned. Clean often and create a chart for who does what when, so everyone has equal opportunity to avoid the most unsavoury of tasks. And light a match once you've had your way with it, for chris'sake.

5) Share condiments BUT: only if you add to the condiment selection. Everything else in the fridge is off limits. Unless, of course, you bought it/made it, then you can eat it. But if it's growing fur, it's your responsibility to make sure it doesn't come back to life.

6) Clean up after yourself: It's essentially the same thing as doing your dishes.

No one wants to sit in a room decorated with your old socks or eat off a table peppered with your marijuana crumbs, however enthusiastic we may be about these assorted items. It's simple and decent to put your belongings in their appropriate places. It's easy, regardless of how stoned you might be.

7) Ask about having outsiders stay over: Note, it's uncool to have someone
stay over for longer than a week straight, even if it's in your room. It's off base to even ask. If you plan on having someone over for one night, no need to say anything (unless your roommate is a real stickler). If they plan on staying two, it's important to let everyone in the house know ahead of time. If more than one person is staying over, even for one night, the same rule applies. And ALWAYS inform your guests which door the bathroom is, lest some serious awkwardness should occur.

8) Communicate: Don't leave notes. Avoid passive aggressive anything. If you have a problem with someone, tell them, but don't be aggressive. It's easier said than done but if everyone lets their resentment fester, it compounds and explodes in typically dramatic and unappealing terms.

9) Wear clothing: You may think your abdominal muscles will weaken the knees of

all the ladies but they won't. It's actually an unseemly nuisance especially if you're hairy and spend most of your time in the kitchen.

10) Use common sense: Don't have any? Find some. It's readily available. Some examples: Buy paper towels when they're all done. Clean the counter if it's dirty. Take out the garbage if it's over-flowing with the week's Ramen noodle packages. Vacuum. Don't be the resident slob in the house because if you are, no one will love you. You'll be regarded with scowls and won't be invited to parties, even if they're thrown in your own home.

Zombies may solve world hunger

2010-12-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

"I don't know what's scarier, the fact that zombies could rise or the fact there are actually people out there that can't wait for it to happen."

- Max Brooks

I've been awaiting the zombie apocalypse for a while now. It'll sure beat a regular apocalypse, which from the movies I have seen will be likely be dull and monotonous.

If humanity truly is doomed, it seems that a zombie uprising is better suited to the unpredictability of life. Life is weird, right? Well, zombies are weird.

Other options for human annihilation are not. Nuclear Armageddon seems lame because we've been waiting for it for 65 years. The Bible's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seems embarrassingly outdated now that we've been desensitized to vampires deflowering teenagers and aliens destroying our most prized architectural achievements. Global warming is the weakest of the bunch. Weather did us in? Please. Humanity can do better than that.

If it's overpopulation and mass starvation, as some are postulating, then we have only the entire human population to blame for its over-stimulated libidos. With a worldwide zombie attack there will be only one person to blame, the daft biochemist who infects his lab assistant with an acne-preventing serum intended for rhesus monkeys but turns humans into narrow-minded flesh-eaters.

Which means that we'll all just be going about our business, pumping the gas, changing the diapers, eating the cheese or whatever, and one day we turn to the sound of some peculiar shuffling in the dining room and BRRRAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGG here's the blood-and-sore-ravaged shell of your beloved using your arm as a beef skewer.

As for the survivors, the American logic of improving self worth through retail products and lip injections will be replaced with something far more visceral - slaughtering zombies! It will be a useful skill and the already-adept video game addicts will have a more productive avenue to direct their latent aggressions.

Yes, losing our friends and family to a legion of the walking dead will certainly be a bummer, but really at least we can get all of our grieving done at one time. And anyway, death by zombie seems like an excellent alternative to costly funeral arrangements.

This is no joke. This could really happen. (Editor's note: this is all a joke.) Popular culture has been preparing us for a large-scale zombie attack for over 40 years. A joint study by Carleton University and University of Ottawa found that an outbreak of the zombie virus "is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly." (Editor's note: this part is not a joke.) We must be prepared.

All will not be lost and there will be some considerable benefits. All our current global dilemmas can be solved by a plague of flesh-eating zombies. Please consider: there will be almost three billion more mouths to feed on this planet by 2060. As the Third World develops its economic superiority, it will pump ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere, dissolving what we in the West are half-assedly attempting to preserve. As countries continue to squabble, all those Pomade-enthusiasts in the 1950s will be proven correct - that nuclear war is imminent at any time. If this happens, we'll either perish immediately or inherit a planet void of bananas as we await our emphysemic fate under a sunless sky.

So, what better way to distract North and South Korea from their petulant squabbling? Zombies! Want to end starvation in the Third World? Watch impoverished zombies eat the impoverished living. World hunger: solved! Four-point-seven billion zombies will lack the motor skills to drive a car or operate a steel mill. Global warming: solved!

There are issues, of course, around the zombies adapting to their environments, like learning how to climb ladders or how to plan strategic offensive attacks, which according to George A. Romero are areas that the living have enjoyed the upper hand. But this is real life people! We must consider all the options for survival, like how to harvest grain in a world ravaged by monsters, or how to deal with the inevitable zombie-fetishists who will put our survivor camps in danger for their own twisted desires. It's a new world people!

Through this new phase of history, we will finally see humanity working together on a united front, confronting a terrifying legion of the walking dead, all in the name of a brighter tomorrow. Humanity can then rebuild itself. A group of people cooperating en masse for a common goal is, to me, the most beautiful thing life has to offer, and the repopulation of the human race seems like a righteous goal, indeed.

Of course, once society is rebuilt we'll likely revert back to the self-destructive behaviour that got us in this zombie-infested mess in the first place. But with any luck, it'll be a new version of self-destruction, which suits me fine because this current incarnation is getting tedious.

Zombies!

The Book Snob

2010-11-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

The single life in a new town can be a lonely one.

I've spent some time sulking in the streets and wondering which of the faces I encounter I'll get to know one day. But I spend most of my time reading, partly to ward off tedium by engaging in the considerable drama of fictional characters. Regardless of how lonely I may sometimes feel, nothing is as dire as Billy Pilgrim coming unstuck in time, as Frodo protecting that problematic ring. These characters can be as engaging as real people but where real people will ignore me for lack of interest in what they see, book people haven't the capacity to do anything but ignore me. They're too tangled up in their own existence to look up and notice the giant human following their every move. Also, they're not real. This brings me enormous satisfaction.

But for the past few years I've used books as a device for meeting people, especially women. Great conversations can begin with the words, "Is that book any good?" Wonderful things can happen. I met a girl once in a New York bar while reading The Doors of Perception and yadda, yadda I haven't seen her since. It's a marvelous tool! They have proven effective conversation lubricant and, coupled with some red wine, you may find that a shared taste in books equates to similar personal philosophies. Chicks love that crap.

In cafes or on transit, I'll position my book in such way that other people will notice the cover and hopefully understand exactly the type of person I'm trying to be. Whether you realize it or not, the book that you choose to read in public will be used by people like me as signal of your internal character and we will use the dust jackets and author name to construct a definition of who you are. If you're reading Robinson Crusoe, you can't let go of the past. If you're reading Dan Brown, you haven't read another book before the one in your lap in 12 years. Fyodor Dostoevsky = melodramatic brooder. We can use this to gauge the depth of conversation should we start to use it. People should be impressed that I'm a quarter of the way through Gravity's Rainbow, though I have no idea what the bloody book is even about. These people will find me "hip," "cultured" and other adjectives prized by young people who have nothing better to think about.

Whistler's a different story all together. "Hip" is as meaningless a word as "blaffugla" and so it's no wonder that I'm single. There are some cultured people here but they tend not to use transit. The ones that do are usually more concerned about hurling their mortal selves over mountainsides than they are about Nabakov's wordplay. Very few people give a good goddamn what I'm reading except maybe my friends and even then interest passes quick. I'm desperate and frightened that I need to find a new gimmick to make people like me.

People have the tendency, and some more than others, to project onto complete strangers the qualities of ourselves we've experienced through works of art. Books in particular say wonders about who this person might be. The fantasies are endless but few Whistler people read in public and I find I have to construct back-stories for transit riders based solely on appearance. Everyone is from Australia, everyone is poor and I have no leeway into conversation.

So imagine my delight when I see a cute girl reading Tom Robbins on the bus. I imagine that she is the feminine version of myself. She reads Pitchfork obsessively and loves homemade perogies. I hold my own book up and lean against the window in such a way that she can see the front cover if she looks over. Maybe she'll like my face but this Michael Chabon dust jacket will surely win her over. I'll speak up, make a passing reference to Still Life With Woodpecker because she's reading it and, because we're identical in personality, she's absolutely smitten by it. The conversation will be smooth, insightful and as she gets off at her stop we promise to see each other again.

And before I've spoken a single word to this girl, we're eating popcorn together on my couch, shoulders touching and the loneliness that compelled the both of us to read in the first place will be locked away and hopefully forgotten for a little while at least.

The Dognapper

2010-10-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

If you steal your roommate's dog, make sure it looks like a run-away scenario. It should go down like this:

Step 1: Ensure the roommate is out of the house at the time of the heist. Step 2: Leave all the dog's belongings behind, especially the kennel. Step 3: Leave the door ajar when you leave to create the illusion that the dog left of its own volition. Step 4: Buy a kennel on the way to the airport. Step 5: Check as luggage when you get there and fly far, far away.

I had this chance when I rescued my roommate's Chihuahua, Peanut, but I was so flustered by the prospect of taking the dog that, in the heat of the moment, I left a note instead. It read, Tabby*, I've taken your dog to the pound. It's better for everyone concerned. Don't bother trying to find him - you've neglected him for too long. I slid the note under her door, and boarded a bus to the Toronto airport.

On the plane to Vancouver, with Peanut's kennel stowed in the luggage compartment below, I developed the comprehensive system of dog-napping mentioned above, realizing that I should have developed it the day before. Oh well. I decided that I would change his name to Patrick Swayze, thereby altering his identity so he could live on the lam together forever. In a perfect world, Peanut and I would live peacefully by passing our days in the abundant British Columbian meadows under vibrant double rainbows while deer and squirrels marveled at our exquisite frolicking skills.

Instead, I returned home to find a series of frantic, caps-locked Facebook messages from Tabby stating that OH MY GAWD I LOVED THAT DOG SO MUCH HOW COULD YOU TAKE HIM U PSYKO!!!! and that she SERCHD ALL THE POUNDZ AND PEANUT ISNT THEIR!!!!

Here was a person who locked her dog in a kennel in the hallway for the first three days he lived with us, and then talked incessantly of getting rid of him every time she opened her mouth. But now that her eccentric former roommate had whisked away her beloved Peanut... well, I guess her reaction was understandable. As power-ballad powerhouses Cinderella philosophized in 1988, "You don't know what you got till it's gone."

Tabby and I got along fine at first, but she was the sort who liked little accessories that fit into her vast collection of purses - and that included Peanut. It was clear from the way she regarded her pet that all she wanted was something fluffy to hug on occasion, without any of the icky responsibilities that came with owning a dog.

What love he hath lost, this poor Peanut. He was no bigger than a Rottweiler's turd and about the same colour. He pissed wherever he pleased and didn't give a damn about it. While this was certainly a symptom of poor house-training on Tabby's part, it said to me he had that right idea about life. I loved him immediately.

He was smaller than most Chihuahua's, and because he pranced when he walked, I had trouble believing he was a man, but I assumed responsibility over him anyway. With Tabby out of the equation, he adopted me as his owner within the week. We'd go for walks - me, wearing lumberjack flannel and a full beard while an effeminate pooch attached to a Louis Vitton leash danced around my ankles. At night, he'd curl up like a furry Danish at the foot of my bed. It was love.

Yet I deferred the serious responsibilities to Tabby, like bathing him or buying him food. It was her dog after all. As a result, he wasn't eating much.

"You can't leave him here," my friend Lauren said one day. We were discussing my impending move to Vancouver and she was holding the dog on her lap, running her hands through his protruding rib cage. His coat had lost some of its sheen and he was shedding more than usual. "Does your roommate even feed him? She hasn't even had him neutered. What kind of cruelty is that? Look at how cute he is."

"Well what am I supposed to do? Just take him?"

It was an option. Lauren and I debated the ethics of the decision over the course of a week: on the one hand, he'd lead a miserable, neglected life if he stayed in Toronto. On the other, I'd be a criminal if I took him. I decided that morality trumped lawfulness in this case and only I could provide the life that Peanut deserved.

I questioned the sanity of this decision for days until I discovered that Tabby had gone away to visit family over the Easter Long Weekend without telling anyone, and had left Peanut behind.

"That's it!" I exclaimed. I looked down at the dog. He was at my feet, wagging his little tail in what was certainly anticipation for my bold declaration. "Dog! You're coming with me!"

It's no big deal, I kept telling myself, Tabby will probably be relieved!

But it seemed my rescue attempt was grossly underappreciated and I couldn't in good conscience keep the dog,.

Step 6: Fly the dog home once your theft is discovered.

*Name changed, for obvious reasons.

One man's advice for surviving in a high-cost pizza world

2010-09-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

I live in Whistler now and pizza prices here are completely absurd. They have inspired empty wallets on more drunken occasions than most of us would have liked. I find myself three dollars short for cab fare. I'm slapping the morning-after coffee on Visa. It's a frustrating situation that can't be rectified unless I drive to Vancouver to pay for, what I feel is, an acceptable price for a slice of pizza. But that wouldn't make any sense.

The pizza companies get away with it because in Whistler, a town brimming with 20-somethings with no discernable cooking skills beyond boiling Ramen noodles, pizza is the fail-safe for a quick and filling bite.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid unloading a quarter of your paycheque. Dominos Pizza offers walk-in/take-away deals for large ($13.50) and medium ($11.50) pepperoni pizzas. It's hardly the best pizza in town, takes on the taste and texture of synthetic rubber following refrigeration but it will fill your belly, if not bloat it eternally.

Ramen-noodle connoisseurs are likely familiar with the assortment of frozen pizzas sold at their favourite grocery store. Of these, Delissio pies are the best deal for size and taste ($9.99 at all grocery stores in Whistler), although they are rife with preservatives and a high fat content that will add pudge to your midsection almost immediately and may take years off your life somewhere down the line.

Ultimately, your safest bet is to make it from scratch. That's right, kids, it's time to learn how to bake your own pizza. It's easy! and good for you for myriad reasons, not least of all for learning the complex and capricious nature of pizza dough. If it's not manipulated the right way, this dough will curl up on you like a frightened baby and sit stubbornly in a gooey lump until you learn the correct way to deal with it. Mastering pizza dough will teach you important life skills that will reveal themselves to you once the mastering is complete. I can't let you in on them - they're secrets.

Pasta Lupino sells such a lump for $3.25 that can make two-three medium pizzas. It also freezes and defrosts like you'd hope dough would: without incident.

Step 1: lightly flour your counter so... wait, no. Step 1 is to free your counter of beer bottles, noodle packages, apple cores, assorted crumbs and, yes, pizza boxes. Then lightly flour the counter top to keep the dough from sticking. Lightly flour your rolling pin and spread the dough out as flat as possible. If you're lacking a rolling pin, a wine bottle will do as well. A beer bottle might work but this is pure speculation.

Once the dough is flattened, you can try the Italian chef flip trick to stretch out the dough but at this beginner stage it's really not necessary. We're aiming for edible food here, nothing fancy.

It should be noted here that the first job I was hired for and subsequently fired from was a Little Caesar's. During my time as a pizza maker, there was a coincidental but dramatic increase in customer complaints over diminished crust-to-topping ratio and/or general absence of mozzarella cheese. I may not be the most qualified person for this particular topic, but since we've come this far I guess there's no turning back...

So anyway, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees, or something. Lightly grease your baking pan and push the dough to the ends. A square baking pan will work just as well as a round pan, so long as you can deal with quadrangle pizza slices.

From there, lay on whatever toppings you fancy. Remember the mozzarella cheese. Oil the crust to make it golden-crispy and delicious. Handle with care and affection. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Let stand for five. Eat. Enjoy.

Afterward, you can take it out with you to the club, kept snug in your purse or a girlfriend's purse. Hell, leave it in your back pocket to remind you that, at the end of the night, when all the drunks lurch toward the same line outside Fat Tony's, you have something cheaper and much quicker: your two home-made slices, wrapped in tin-foil. They'll be a little mushy, sure, but at least you made them yourself and that's better than anything a plump fellow named Tony can provide.

Long distance relationships might ruin your life

2010-09-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

It ended like this: I was down on my knees by the door, tying my shoes and concentrated on them. She was leaning against a doorframe to the next room, arms folded across her chest. I was avoiding her gaze. It was easier that way.

She said: "I feel like we've been here so many times." An appropriate cliché.

I grunted. I shrugged. I finished with the other shoe and stood up. I smoothed out the wrinkles in my sweatshirt, took my keys and wallet from the foyer table. I scanned the room for the rest of my belongings and caught her eyes. They were tired. She wanted me out. If she was done, we were done. She held the power. That's how it rolled.

In my blacker moments I'll tell you that long distance relationships don't work. I can say with some authority that they are awful, wretched beasts and will leave you feeling withered and depressed. You'll spend more time than necessary pining away and you'll find that yearning is the emotional equivalent of narcotic withdrawal.

I knew from the start that unless I was patient enough, mature enough and desperate enough to make the distance between us work, it probably wouldn't. A one-time healthy and intimate relationship was quickly replaced with bi-weekly phone conversations. Just two voices passing each other through telephone wire. I soldiered on anyway but I wasn't a saint. I used her as a scapegoat for all the other nonsense that was going on in my life, as so many of us unfortunately do with our partners. My eyes kept wandering and while I never acted on it, I would often wonder what life would be like if I just cut her loose and asked out this beautiful stranger at the coffee shop trading smiles with me between sips of her macchiato.

But I'm selling us way too short. We were groovy once and I'll love her for that, that girl I knew. And anyway, there are great benefits to long distance relationships that are rarely talked about. We can learn to communicate with each other on a level that may not have been afforded before when we were lying in bed all day, wrapped up in each other's limbs.

Also, it can be difficult for people to strike a balance between personal growth and commitment in a relationship. Both are important but one tends to dominate the other. In a long distance relationship, we're forced into finding this balance. The situation will harden us and force us to mature, no matter what. We're afforded the time to reflect on what commitment in this relationship really means to us. Nothing tests the strength of a relationship more effectively than chronic separation.

If we can get through it, we may be more mature and self-assured about ourselves as individuals and as a couple because of the separation. If we're open, honest and there for each other whenever, wherever, it may work. It may, because in the end it all comes down to how much we're willing to put up with the gross hassle of a long distance relationship and all the drama it breeds.

We tried all of this. It didn't work and we gradually grew apart. It was a slow smothering of the beast. After a year apart and a country between us, we gave it one last jolt to save its life but it died anyway. We recognized the corpse for what it was, right there in the foyer.

I dropped my gaze to the floor. "Well that's it then," I said.

"I guess so."

She smiled. I offered something closer to a grimace and then bolted out the door without saying goodbye. I marched on down the steps toward some different kind of life. It was a weird moment, like when a bicycle is shifting gears and nothing's in its right place. There are no songs or sounds for limbo, only the thudding of your broken, agitated heart.

I stood at my car and thought seriously about storming back inside, waving my finger in the air and making some dramatic, all-encompassing statement. But there was really nothing to say. I had nothing. It had all been said and several times over. We haven't spoken since.

On another note...

...if you can't stand living in Whistler, don't hate on it. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all in your head, mate. So just leave.

It seems that people who can't get along in Whistler came of age in a town or city with a completely different personality. As a result, they too have a completely different personality than what might jive with what Whistler has to offer.

And then, in the process of the inevitable self-exploration and confusion that comes with being new to a setting they don't understand, these people project the ugly parts of their own personality onto the people and landscapes of the place they now blame for their misery.

It happened to me anyway. I moved from Vancouver to Toronto and found those people to be shallow, cold, soulless, etc. I hated it. But now, being away from it, I realize it wasn't the people or the place that made my experience so miserable. It was about me all along and only about me.

The city wasn't a right fit, just as Whistler might not be a fit for you. Whistler is tolerant. And it isn't. It's fun. And it isn't. Just like Toronto, or London, or anywhere really. It depends on what you've seen and how you choose to see it.

The Snowboarder's Beret

2010-08-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I've worn a toque in the summer. It was, like, 1998. I was 14. I wore a Limp Bizkit T-shirt and a wallet chain too. The toque was embroidered with a Saskatchewan Roughriders logo. I thought I was the Absolute Business because I had smoked pot, like, three times but to everyone else I'm sure I was just another dork wearing a black beanie in the heat.

That phase ended fast, followed by others of varying embarrassment until the evolution of the fine specimen pictured to the right was complete. In that time, I developed a deep intolerance for inappropriate clothing, inherited from my father. Fleece in a rainstorm, for instance. A leather vest at the beach. Super skinny jeans anywhere. I once dumped a girl because she only wore corsets, skirts and high heels, no matter the occasion. How ridiculous? I couldn't get past it.

The way we prepare for the weather says everything about who we are as people. I have the biggest winter jacket ever made. I am a wimp for snow. Wearing a turtleneck at the beach in Morocco says to me you're either completely impractical or utterly insane, and unless you're some kind of wizard I'll address your sensible friend in the tank top, thank you very much.

So, for these reasons, I believe wearing a toque in the heat is a menacing social ill that must be addressed. It must be tackled with authority and intelligent decision making to ensure that our children are safe from... whatever evils such a fashion trend may breed. Overheating perhaps, or premature balding.

It's such a baffling situation that Kevin Damaskie, sustainability coordinator at the RMOW, mentioned it in a completely unrelated interview about the official community plan update that there may be a clause in there banning toques in the summer. He may have been serious.

Of course, there are matters of vastly superior importance that a young journalist should be tackling but this has plagued me anyway since I moved to Whistler last month. I went straight to the source: Mason Mashon, a designer for Voleurz clothing, chronic wearer of toques.

"The answer is simple: glacier season," he wrote me in an e-mail. "Toques are the appropriate headwear of choice for shredding in the summer, and they're comfortable. You won't see people wearing ball caps up there because they are an impractical fit with goggles, and they will blow off if you are carrying any speed on your skis or snowboard."

He continues: "The toque also supports the image of these kids who want to be recognized as shredders. Toques and goggle tans are a sure fire sign that you are dedicated to the snow."

A startling vision: the village teeming with 20 year olds wearing ski goggles instead of sunglasses. And toques. And half of them have their arms in a sling.

But I see it. I get it. The French have their berets. The Arabs wear their headscarves. Mexicans have sombreros. It's all about fashion, man - that blossom of the soul. The toque is the snowboarder's beret. It makes sense that many of the Toque Children are of French or Quebec heritage.

But what of the health concerns? Certain fashion trends have led to serious health problems. Foot binding in China led to deformation. Tight lacing with corsets led to displaced internal organs. This is exactly the same thing. No?

"I will say there will be no consequence from wearing a toque in the summer," said Dr. Hugh Fisher outside his office at Northlands Medical Clinic. "At the very least, it will protect - minimally - their heads from their skateboarding injuries."

The Good Doctor claimed that wearing a toque in heat will not lead to overheating (they'll probably take them off), to chronic sweat or stench issues (they'll probably shower) or to premature baldness ("That's just ridiculous"). In fact, toques will hide a man's premature bald spots (e.g. their shame), affording them a more youthful look.

He and his receptionist went on to defend the use of toques year-round, laughing the whole time - at my expense, of course. The nut of it, he said, is that these toques keep their heads warm, even as the sun melts it right off their heads.

"Keeping your head warm in Whistler is like keeping your scrotum cold with a kilt in Scotland," he said.

More than that, I wonder if it's a subconscious pleading with the snow god Ullr to bring an early snow season. It's like a shredder's version of the Zuni rain dances. If they will it from the very core of their being, right up through the cap that adorns their skulls, maybe he'll bring the snow and make it brilliant.

But whatever the case, it looks ridiculous and I'm going to fight it with every atom of my being. You better watch it, Frenchy.

- published Pique Newsmagazine August 12, 2010

The Neighbour Upstairs

2010-07-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

I once lived in a crowded split-level house in downtown Toronto that was overrun by 10 university students. There was a jam space in the basement suite next to ours that housed a rotating list of maladroit punk rockers annihilating their instruments every single day. The tenants may have been vampires. They’d mill about until the wee morning hours, banging stuff and carrying on, their voices floating through the thin walls of the house and into my room.

The worst of them was the tenant living directly above me. She was 20 or so, with a Susan Boyle haircut, the snout/build of an English bulldog and, I can only assume, rubber mallets for legs. At all hours of the night, she’d pace back and forth and it seemed that the floor — my ceiling — was going to cave in. She kept me up most nights, dragging chairs, playing music, walking around — just, y’know, living. She was ruining my life.

It wasn’t entirely her fault — the house was a structural nightmare — but from this, I developed an acute irritation to even the slightest household noise, especially at night, and especially that of footsteps above me. I left that dump in March, moved to Vancouver and vowed to never, ever, ever live with roommates again.

And then I moved to Whistler. Finding the right spot at an affordable price is like a rite of passage in this town, usually discovered through word of mouth and only if one has the right connections. I do not. Nor do I have $1,200 to spend on the one-bedroom suites advertised in this paper. I viewed a dozen or so places before settling in the master bedroom with a view of Alpha Lake in a townhouse inhabited by two Grateful Dead fans. Life is great — except there’s a third roommate. And he lives directly above me.

I hadn’t met him before my first night in my new room but, based on the heavy thumping at 2 a.m., I gathered he must be some kind of ogre. The house was built in the 1970s and the floorboards creak with every step. Naturally, I spent the night cursing this stranger, sweaty and irritated, vowing to one day (and soon) live alone in a shack in the woods and never get married, never have kids. Never mind companionship, a man needs sleep.

The next day, I played over in my head how I would tell this stranger that his mere existence above me was driving me absolutely insane. I would approach him with a cold 12-pack of Old Milwaukee, offer him one and ask him to keep it down once midnight rolls around.

Is it acceptable to ask this person — or any person really — to limit what he does in his own room? And, if so, does he then have the right to tell me to go fuck myself? Because we all have the right to our private spaces and to do as we please within them. It’s when our actions negatively affect other people that changes in our behaviour are warranted.

Granted, it’s mainly my neurosis fueling this one-man drama. And I know that some people in Whistler exist quite comfortably living two or three people to a room, in houses of eight, nine or 10 people. But it was noisy up there and, neurotic or not, he was keeping me up at night. Don’t I, like every other person, have the right to a peaceful rest in a quiet room, if I so choose? That night, as the creaking and thumping continued, I decided that my right to a quiet sleep trumped his right to walk around.

The next day, he was cooking up a stir-fry. I took an Old Milwaukee from the fridge (one of 12) and we exchanged hellos. I discovered that he was not an ogre after all but a friendly, beady-eyed fellow from Victoria. We made congenial small talk about work and the weather before settling into a brief silence. His stir-fry sizzled.

“So how’s your room working out?” I asked.

“It’s working out good.” He poured some soy sauce on the skillet and it hissed. “How’s yours?”

“Yeah, it’s good, y’know.” I took a swill of beer. “The only thing is, um, the floorboards between our rooms are kind of weak and…” And so on.

He of course had no idea what Hell had been raised just eight feet below him. He seemed genuinely concerned about this problem. He said if ever there was an issue, all I had to do was simply knock on the ceiling. I offered him some beer.

So far, no problems. But now, every time I see my roommate, I imagine his dark eyes are black pits of resentment, burning fiercely now that his ability to walk freely from end to end in his room has now been impeded.

Because of this, I imagine that he now considers his new roommate a terrible nuisance, and that he lies awake at night, restless and sweaty, while this roommate sleeps soundless and totally at ease.

- published Pique Newsmagazine July 15

Breaking (and baking) bannock with First Nations

2010-06-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting around a table with 10 elderly tourists watching a man in Aboriginal regalia fry bannock. I never heard of bannock. We’re in a circle in the Istken Hall at the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, glancing awkwardly at each other; at the bannock sizzling softly in the pan; at the tray of singe-serving peanut butter and jam, placed neatly in a basket next to a pile of serviettes.

Bill Ritchie, the man in regalia, looks around and, noticing our silence and timid glances, says, “This is not a family recipe. This is a survivor bachelor recipe.” Everyone laughs and now we’re all friends.

The centre was hosting a baking session for the community Monday as part of National Aboriginal Day. It was advertised in a press release as a “Bannock Baker’s Session,” and while I’ll soon learn that bannock is made in a multitude of ways across the UK, North America and Tibet, there’s no baking to be had in the Istken Hall this afternoon. Don’t be fooled. Today, we’re frying up some pancakes.

Basically. Traditional bannock, which Bill and his colleague Gerald Paul are making for us in portable frying pans, looks like a biscuit-pancake hybrid that, from the basket of PB and J on the table, can be served with any variety of spreads.

“What kind of flour do we use?” asks an old woman from Olympia.

“I like to use Robin Hood all purpose flour…” Gerald says and goes into a detailed history of the how Robin Hood came to be tied up so thoroughly with Aboriginal culture.

“But is it what flour?” says the lady.

“Um, all purpose flour.”

“But not corn flour,” she says. There’s tension now. “It’s wheat flour.” She’s not asking this time.

“Right,” he says. “Robin Hood flour.”

He goes on to explain how bannock is prepared. It’s similar to a pancake and thus very simple:

1) Mix in a bowl: two cups of flour, a pinch of salt, two tablespoons of baking powder and a teaspoon of sugar (which is optional, giving the bannock sweeter taste and a more golden crust when finished).

2) Add 1½ cups of boiling water and stir until the mix is a paste.

3) Take globs of this paste and fry in a pan with ½ cup of oil for about 10 minutes, until both sides are golden-brown.

According to Bill, the Scots brought bannock to North America in the 1700s and gave it to the Natives. It’s been woven deep into Aboriginal tradition ever since, similar to the Irish and potatoes, the Chinese and rice. Today, it’s used similar to how the English use the biscuit, served with tea, coffee, or soup. The possibilities are seemingly endless.

Each First Nation across North America adds its own twist or flare to the production: brown-sugar bannock, cheddar and bacon bannock, and on and on. Gerald says a popular dish in this region is called the Indian taco, which uses all the same ingredients as a regular taco but bannock is used instead of the shell.

Bill says, “One time, my brother and I were so desperate to make bannock but we had no oil. Do you know what we used?”

“Motor oil?” someone says and everyone laughs at this vaguely racist comment.

The bannock looks a little like fried cod when it’s done, lightly browned and dripping in oil. Gerald claims that this is his first time making bannock in two years. The elderly all take turns slicing it up, taking bites and humming and cooing in delight through their mouthfuls.

I take my own bite. It’s fluffy, a bit heavy and absolutely delicious. It tastes just like a biscuit-pancake hybrid. It would taste even better with jam. Or soup! Or coffee… I can feel a new love affair blossoming. The fluffiness! The versatility, oh!

By the time you read this, I’ll have gone on a serious bannock bender, “baking it” everyday, gaining 15 pounds in the belly within the week and hopefully swearing off it. It’s just that good.

- published Pique Newsmagazine June 24, 2010

Hustlers

2010-01-17T14:53:00.001-08:00

Megaphone published my story about Vancouver's male sex trade last July and I forgot about it until a couple days ago. It's an important story – read it, if you have time. And check out the rest of the Megaphone site – it's a good one.

(Thanks to Frances, for reminding me)

Beards

2010-01-12T18:49:00.001-08:00

I saw a man and what a man he was.

He was in mid-20, a slender fellow, wearing skinny jeans, slim-fitting leather jacket and a red scarf. Not exactly the archetype of alpha-masculinity that has been passed down through the ages.

But he had a beard. And not just any beard. A luxuriant beard, thick as the fur on a orangutan's hide. It was rich in colour, too, owning a deep brown with a scarlet hue. Oh! How I envied that man.

I have a beard, see, but it's patchy in places, blond in others. It feels wispy and weak like pubic hair when it gets too long.

Some might say it's a decent enough beard, but decent is not enough. I see these guys, the same age as I, with lustrous manes of fur starting just below their eyeballs – as if every facial pore were a follicle, each one clutching like scepters one glorious hair! – and I long to be one of them.

You see, facial hair is the great signifier of masculinity for men of my generation. Fashion alone no longer does the trick. It has become androgynous, sometimes subtly (skinny jeans), sometimes overtly (jewel encrusted T-shirts, purses slung around biceps).

In the early 20th century, male fashion was at one time the key indicator of status and masculinity, particularly among the blue collar workers. But from the 1960s onward – between long hair, bell-bottoms, a thankfully brief period of booty shorts in the 1980s and finally, the appropriation of metrosexuality into everyday manhood – a manly man can also be as primmed as a beauty queen.

So, for us (or maybe just for me, whatever), a full beard is the penultimate symbol of masculinity. (Penis, what?) I prove my manhood by flaunting an untamed forest of virility – on my face. It's one of the few common bonds we share with our simian brothers.

If a man can grow a beard, he should. There are men that would love to grow beards but settle for wimpy moustaches instead. We owe it to these guys to flaunt what we have. Men who are blessed with ample facial hair but who shave their faces are a)wasting precious sleeping minutes every morning and b) are denying themselves the true essence of masculinity -- as untamed and unruly as the jungle. You were right ladies, all along.

So I see this dude walking down the street, with the wildest bush of primordial manhood covering most of his face, skinny jeans and all, and I stand in awe. Blessed be that beard.

Humongous Volcanoes...

2009-12-14T15:10:00.000-08:00

...and everything you need to know about them, HERE.

Slam Wrap Cut

2009-11-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

I’m waiting for the Paper Scissor Rock World Championship to begin, drumming my fingers on the bar. Bartender slides my beer and I take a nice pull. My confidence soars and I think, This world is mine.

A woman numbered 200 on her competitors tag singles me out and challenges me to a few practice round. The rules are simple: Rock beats scissor beats paper beats rock. She beats me three times straight, no problem. My confidence slumps.

See, I’ve never been good at rock-paper-scissor – the classic children’s game and, later in life, the Great Decider of who buy beers or who rides shotgun. It’s usually me in back seat with a case of beer in my lap. Most people chalk it up to luck but luck, it seems, has little to do with it.

“There is no luck in rock-paper-scissors because there is no random determining anything…It’s a game of pattern recognition,” says Brad Fox, grand marshal for the event. “How fast can you recognize what patterns your opponent falls in to and how can you keep yourself from falling into recognizable patterns?”

He takes his role very seriously, describing game history and protocol with such conviction one might think the fate of our world depends on armies of scissors cutting through the planet's entire supply of paper.

Fox says RPS is one of the – if not the – most widely played game in the world, with versions of it existing on every continent, dating as far back as 2000 B.C. in Egypt. In the West however – in Toronto, in particular, at the Steam Whistle Brewery on a Saturday night – it’s a sport of true competition, drawing a crowd of 400 players and another 400 or so spectators, many of them dressed in outlandish costume. A bumblebee here. Captain America there.

“It really is the great equalizer in many ways,” says Doug Walker, co-founder of the event. “The richest man in the world, the male or female, the most able-bodied or disabled – there’s no inherent advantage “

An announcement is made and everyone gathers at the foot of the stage in the main concourse. The costumed drunks yip and holler. Someone had torn off all fingers but the middle of a complimentary giant foam-hand and now he’s waiving it in the air. Someone spills a beer on my camera and I think what a fitting sponsor this event has in Yahoo.

And with that, it begins.

Each referee is more serious than the last. Ours is a stout woman with a quivering voice. “Welcome to the sport,” she says, “you are the elite of your sport, congratulations on making it this far,” with no hint of irony.

She explains the rules – no cheating; best three out of three; once you’ve lost you’re out for good – and pairs us off. I follow her extended finger to a Nordic with a blonde crew cut and hollow eyes, clutching a miniature Norwegian flag.

He crushes me in four consecutive throws, no problem. The ref rips my undefeated stub from my competitors tag with dramatic flare and the Norwegian introduces himself as Petter Olsen, Norwegian national champion.

“Your routine was quite easy, I saw it quite early,” he said. “Sometimes its difficult but I saw your type and I just went for it.”

Disturbing. Who is this Norseman and how can he see through me so clearly?

And, more importantly, why can't I see through him?

“You have to read the person and what type of personality,” he adds. “Is he an intellectual guy, is he a macho type? Does he think he knows what he’s doing?” The game is an experiment in psychio-analysis to suss out each opponants playing patterns.

According to Fox, women statistically lead with scissors; men lead with stones. Journalists, regardless of sex, tend to lead with paper. Often, people will just “wing it” but because randomness can never be tamed, Fox says the best strategy is to plan one and recognize your opponent’s patterns.

The pattern. Yes. As the astrologers and mystics of yore understood, it’s all about the pattern. I see it now: my own daft inability to recognize the pattern. The ones who advance in this tournament, it seems, possess ultra-sensitive pattern recognition system that they may not even know about.

I plan a strategy – play the hand that defeated my last throw. I challenge a dozen people or so. I lose every match, every throw, every single time. There’s no hope here. The players missing “undefeated” tags grow larger in numbers buy the minute, sticking out like amputated soldiers. There’s a peculiar excitement in the air, cut with an endless drone of cheering, topped with dim lighting and weird costumes. A bumble bee here. Captain America there.

It turns out Captian America– aka Tim Conrad of Taylor, Michigan – will win the world championship, swindling $7000 from Yahoo’s pockets for throwing his fingers around.

But he had no pattern, he’ll tell me two days later. He just felt it from the gut and it rose like a snarling, primitive beast – that urge to throw rock and rock after rock after scissor.

Yes. A true life lesson, Captain America. To hell with luck! To hell with patterns! Throw what you feel and rule the world.

Pumpkin

2009-11-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

Who likes pumpkins? I sure do. More so than regular news, that's for sure.

New Job

2009-07-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

When I got the call, I didn't scream with relief like I thought I would. Instead, I politely accepted the offer and wondered around my neighbourhood in a daze. Trying to make sense of it. Barely noticing the day's heat boiling my skin. The young mothers and their strollers. The hot bikini babes. The tall oak trees bending their branches down waiving to me as I go. The camera store employee with the long hair I always see smoking outside of Blenz. All of it seems irrelevant.

After all the stressing and drowning in self-doubt and almost folding under the pressure of it all – and waiting, waiting, waiting for Life to finally start happening – finally, all of it coming together with a single phone call. With a man on the other end, sounding very much what I imagine God to sound like (bold and assertive, yet jovial and welcoming!), and telling me: "We'd like to offer you the position."

"Uh...alright."

"Is that a yes?"

"Damn right it is."

"Do you have any questions for me?"

"Um. Is there anything I should ask?"

He laughs and said: "I'm surprised that I interviewed 42 people and not a single one asked me how much the pay is."

So of course I asked, but not necessarily because I was curious but because I was on auto-pilot, doing what I was instructed to do. And then hearing what they pay...

All of that feeding into this swirl of emotion. Utter confusion in the blistering heat, but a good confusion, like when making sense of the swirls on a head of cotton candy.

And then I start bawling like a newly orphaned child. Right there, in the middle of the street. In the city, with the heat pressing UV weights on my shoulders. My town, the one I love. The one with the sexy bikini babes and young mothers with their strollers. And the tall oak trees.

Mouse

2009-07-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

So, because I’m a man, she asks me, “Will you come by and get rid of the mouse?

“Uh, sure. Of course.”

“Are you sure?” she says. I’ve already forgotten her name. I actually never knew it.

“I hope you don’t mind. My roommate is, like, freaking out over it.”

“Sure. No big deal.”

“And my boyfriend would do it but I’m not seeing him tonight.”

“Absolutely. Not a problem.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

So we her friend Gabby alone at the with our wine and my personal items: journal, map, wallet. Not a good idea since I’d known these two all of 20 minutes. I consider myself a decent judge of character except when alcohol’s involved. I’ve been burned before.

Like the time in Brussels an Arab fellow wrapped his leg around mine and did a funny little dance with me. This didn’t seem weird to me. I just thought he was being friendly. After the third time, I was really into it. Until he ran off suddenly and I noticed that my wallet was missing…

But I’m not thinking about any of this. We’re walking down Queens Street and the Girl With No Name keeps thanking me, over and over. “This is so nice of you, oh my God” and so on. I’ve never visited Toronto so I have no idea if all women here are relentlessly gracious. I know she’s just being nice but there’s only so much gratitude I can accept in three minutes. Especially when I haven’t done anything yet.

She unlocks the door to her apartment – maybe three doors from the bar. It’s a discreet number sandwiched between two boutiques. Inside, her flat is spacious, the type of suite that costs people their children’s eyeballs in Manhatten.

“Nice place,” I say.

“I know! Isn’t it fun? The dead mouse is in her room.”

And indeed it is, in the corner, lying still on one of those glue traps, the flimsy platter types that toddlers sometime mistake as playtime toys, and wail like genocide victims when pulled from their chests.

This particular trap had attracted lint and what looked like human hair. I crouch down to pick up the dead mouse’s final resting disc but the mouse starts squirming and squeaking.

“Ah! It’s still alive! Look! See!”

“Oh my God, oh my god. You are such a trooper.”

The mouse keeps squeaking, trying to right itself off its side to no avail. It’s skin pulls with every thrust the mouse makes to escape and squeals in, what I assume to be, astonishing pain. It looks up at me. Squeaks. Eyes pleading.

“What are we going to do with this thing? Should we let it go?” I ask her.

“Let’s just leave it in the street.”

“And then what? Leave it for dead?” I say this in the stairwell and she opens the door, dusk light flooding in. The mouse and I squeal in unison.

I bend over to the leave the disc at the door of one of the boutiques – a fancy shoe shop, very classy.

“No, over here. In the alley.”

So walk four or five paces with the disc held out like it’s a platter and I’m a waiter serving Mouse a la Carte. A man notices and almost jumps out of his skin. Almost, but not quite.

“Ah!” he says.

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s stuck.”

The alley is clean – too clean for an alley. No Dumpsters or hobos. No trash of any kind. It’s baffling. I set the mouse down as it gives one final pleading glance over its itty-bitty shoulder. I consider pulling it off with my fingers but the anti-rodent lobby has done a number on me. I’m scared it might carry malaria, despite the records showing no mouse has ever carried malaria.

But I still feel bad for the little bastard. “We should let it go. Do you have a stick?”

The Girl With No Name doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t acknowledge this query in any way, so we move on.

“Oh my god, you are such a trooper. Such. A. Trooper.”

“Yeah…”

So we sit down and I take a liberal swig of wine and tell Gabby the story.

“And those are supposedly the ‘humane’ animal traps,” she says.

I nod in agreement, but it gets me wondering how that’s any more humane than the traps that break their necks? Or killing it the old fashion way, with a boot or a bottle of shampoo? Letting it starve to death on a flimsy plastic disc is a cruel punishment for simply being a mouse in someone’s house. I wouldn’t like it a whole lot if the mouse did that to me; why should I treat it any different?

Later on, when I’m stumbling towards the hotel with my glass of wine in hand, a police cruiser stops me. They reprimand me, write me up. And I felt like that little mouse on the platter. Stuck and squirming to present my case to the powers that held my fate. The only difference is that mouse died that night and I slept in absolute luxury, with pillows the size English mastiffs.

Stressful Day

2009-07-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

Breath tastes like stale beer

Kiss her as I leave

Bike has a flat tire

Broke my sunglasses yesterday

Squinting in the morning sun

UV rays lead to headaches

$2.50 for the bus

Moment of serenity while eating a bagel

New task on the job is both dull and complicated

Health comes into question now that Michael Jackson is dead

Rising health concerns due to increased belly fat

Belly fat bulging over the belt line of my shorts

Mind never stops wandering to issues of great concern

Must attend a wedding in a week

Must buy a new suit for the occasion

Must buy a new tire

Should get some exercise tonight but I have some shopping to do

A protest to photograph

A movie to attend

My left knee is acting up again

I’ve been avoiding opening my credit card bill

It calls for my attention like an ugly ex-girlfriend

The tension in my chest snakes down to my arm

My left arm is weaker than my right

Scanning the web for degenerative diseases

Working with the knowledge that this job is a waste of my talents

I miss writing as an outlet for frustration and confusion

Blowing off responsibility to do so right now

Wondering if I’ll ever get where I’m going

Tapping senselessly on a keyboard

Thoughts wander as aimless as the Messiah

Chatting with workmates through an online forum

Looking at my workmates in the flesh

Pining away for my pillow

Break for lunch without a word

Pinch the fat of my belly as I walk

Tensions are high at the sandwich shop

The mall is a frenzy

$600 for half-decent suits

Dust in the office clogs up the sinuses

Deadlines are looming

Payment of Medical Service Plan approaching

Failing to ignore a toothache

Reading that dental health and life span are inextricably linked

Scanning the web for information on the matter

Resist the urge to buy myself a Slurpee

Fail to resist the urge to buy myself a Slurpee

Have the first afternoon cigarette four or five months

Smoking is a way to snuff myself out

Conservatism

2009-06-26T08:26:00.001-07:00

Funny, that the conservatism of right-wing Christians is rooted in the philosophies and teachings of one of the greatest liberals that ever lived. Hilarious.

Families

2009-06-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 2007 that the Great Depression "was so bad, white people had to raise their own kids."

And it got me thinking: looking at the history of European and North American middle and upper class, they usually had maids, nannies, slaves, butlers. It was customary not to raise their own children. Which means, it's not in our blood or in our history to have close familial ties.

And I look at African families, Aboriginal traditions, South American traditions – all that – that supported strong familial bonding. Bonding within the community, where children aren't raised by their parents alone but by entire villages. Not always, but sometimes.

Just a thought...

Neda Soltani

2009-06-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

I've been following this closely. Sad beeswax.

From yesterday:

Neda Agha-Soltani's Death Sows Seeds of Revolution

And today:

Neda Soltani Death Another 'Shot Heard 'round the World'

Enjoy?

Susan Boyle, not a girl, not yet a woman.

2009-06-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

Read this here.

http://my.nowpublic.com/culture/susan-boyle-cancels-more-gigs-nowpublic-moves-ignore-her

The Office

2009-06-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

So, suddenly you stare out the window of your office and the trees are bending in your direction. The wind is pushing them and when it settles, the trees bend back into place. They look like they're calling you over, like your mother might with her pointer finger.

And you want to follow the pull of the foliage finger. To run out the tree and amble up it. To feel the bark like dry skin between your fingers. The little knobs that'll scratch your shins, make them bleed. To climb to the top and look down at below. To holler something unintelligent. Anything at all.

You want to but the call of responsibility is keeping you set in your seat. You have documents to file, pages to type. Emails to respond to. People in collars with motives different than your own to converse with in order to "get the ball rolling" or to "get things done" or to "slate that fucker."

Never mind that for now. Your eyes relaxed. Vision a blurred impression of what reality's supposed to be. Like when you were young, lying in the back seat of the van, on trips or whatnot, gazing absently at the window as the scene scrolling past in rambling colours. When nothing was defined. You or your world. Soft shapes and everything was light.

Ah. Follow the pulling finger of the tree outside your window. Ignoring your computer. Of the voices of others. People talking business. Blocking out the sound of telephones ringing.

Your telephone. Ring. Ring. Rrrrrriiiiiiiinnnnggggg.

"Hello?"

"This - is - an - automated - message - from - the - Vancouver - Public - Library -"

Click.

The trees stopped moving. You blink, refocus your vision. Eyeballs dry and itchy. Look at the clock. 12:20. Lunch. Open your top desk drawer. You eat that Snickers and savour it like you're seven.

Curse This City: B-Line @ 2:30 p.m.

2009-06-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

I could have taken the 22 right to my house but no. I can sneak on the B-Line for free – bless this city.

The back door opens and there're a dozen Asian children staring, slate-faced and blinking. I push through them to find a seat but the only one's in the middle of two fat peoples – a man and a woman. Plop between the two and the woman nudges over the best she can. Gives me a good-natured smile.

The man keeps his wide set thighs spread wide, well into my personal space. I consider asking him to please shift but the scowl on his face + the skull and flames bicep tattoo + the 100 or so scars criss-crossing up and down both arms indicate to me I better leave him be.

The bus is stuffy. The sun outside is beating hotter every-second and I'm already sticky from the heat. Naturally, the mass of human warmth improves nothing.

The children are yipping and screaming, crowding what little space there is on the back of the bus. Their voices are pre-pubescent and piercing. As people get off and more pile on at the next stop, the crowd shifts and swells until there're four small children pressed up against me. One little girl in a pink sweat suit is pressed against my knee, almost on top of it. This is awkward and unnerving.

"Excuse me," I say. "Little girl? Excuse me."

But she's saying something in Cantonese to her friend, speaking at a high volume over the cacophony. The doors open to let more people out and more people in.

The crowd shifts again and the little girl ends up between my legs. My anxiety swells and I try to push her back into the crowd – not too forcibly, of course – but she doesn't seem to notice. She doesn't seem to care that she's standing between the legs of an absolute stranger.

It's too much. I poke her on the shoulder. "Excuse me, can you please move over just a little bit?"

She nods, tries to move but the crowd is so dense that I can just barely squeeze my right knee around her. Now I'm sitting sideways, bunched in the fetal position with my hands locked between my thighs and the good-natured fat lady's. And the bus lurches ever onward. A bead of sweat drips from my bangs and slowly – so slowly – rides the bridge of my nose, down the bulb and hangs there for a few seconds. I can't wipe it away – the bus is too crowded. It finally drops and it lands on my lips. It takes like a saltine cracker.

Bottom Line: Three "Curse This City"'s means I may be a pessimist after all.

Curse This City: Bus Stop People

2009-06-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

A man sits slumped on the stairs of a downtown building, Gauze taped to his forearms at four spots. Cigarette hanging from his lips, clutching the pack of Player's Light with his left hand – the flesh scarred and wrinkled. Track marks red as lipstick running in sporadic lines to the crook of his arm.

He stands up, looks around. Eyes glassy, confused. Red and irritated. He rubs at them. Rubs his arms, traces his bloated veins with a finger. Hunched over and swaying, he tries to walk down the stairs but he lurches instead. Too incapacitated to move, so he sits back down. Let's the smoke fall from his lips. Mouth agape, starting to drool.

And every person passing by stares as they walk. Nobody offering assistance.

He's a sight. He's a gimmick. Someone unfortunate to pit. Someone to compare and resolve their own failures. Because it could always be worse.

And no one lends a helping hand. We get on the bus and we're gone.

Bottom line: I'm just as bad.

An Exaggeration

2009-06-11T09:00:00.001-07:00

The sun is melting your face. Your skin will start to peel. The dust in the air is causing a brutal tickle in your throat, so you take a sip of your beer. The $9 beer you've been clutching for a half-hour now because you can't afford another – and the line's too long at the beer booth anyway. You take that sip and it's warm. Some pseudo-hippie with a bronze tan, wearing short-shorts and nothing else walks up to you, puts his arm around you. He's sweaty and sticky from a round in the crowd at the main stage. You had seen him there, hugging another man dressed just like him. He's smoking a spliff now – takes a pull and he says, “Did you see the Decemberists?” You shake your head, terribly confused by this hippie's strange behaviour. He smells like apples and you don't know why. He continues: “I always thought they sounded like a wistful winter's evening but, shit, they rocked the house!” He takes his arm off yours, passes you his joint. You take it – not because you enjoy drugs but because this is a $300, 3-day music festival and you're gonna take it for all that it's worth. He walks away without a word and you wipe the sweat off your brow with a yellowing handkerchief. The racket of some band you've never heard floats above the the scene, carried in with the breeze, and you think: This is all very weird.

Daily Wisdom #1

2009-06-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

To be bored means you must be a boring person. Or have boring sensibilities.

If you're imaginative enough, creative enough or personable enough, there's unlimited resources to keep every single one of us stimulated, always and forever.

Does writing this make me pretentious? Let's see a show of hands...

Curse This City: Tinseltown McDix

2009-06-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

I'm holding a $15 in my hand while I'm waiting to purchase my two cheeseburgers (and thus, my happiness) and a homeless lady asks:

"Can I have some money for an ice cream."

She sees the money, so I say: "I'll buy you an ice cream."

"Ok," She says. "Actually, can you buy me a small milk shake instead?"

I don't answer. I'm then bum-rushed by two others seeking the same treatment. Cold shoulders for both.

One of the newbies asks the other customers for spare change. The ice cream lady pushes her, says: "Get out of here. I was here first."

Then she turns to me and says: "Now that's just rude."

Conundrum #2

2009-06-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

How many times can one person thank another before it becomes useless?

Class of '09

2009-06-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Look at it. It's a whole new era. Feel it. The wind has flung wide open and with it comes change.

North American social institutions are either evolving or on the verge of collapsing: the daily newspapers, automobile companies, international money markets. My generation stands on the stoop.

We will be the purveyors of advancements in culture, economics and technology. These will be our children, born from perseverance, intellect and creativity. We are the Fulcrum Generation: the first to be raised knowing the errors of our mothers and fathers, but also with the knowledge of how to fix it. Once we step through that door, the world will follow with us.

And that wind is howling. The door banging heavily against the frame as the wind rushes through, carrying with it the howls of the dead lost to their mistakes.

And I stand on that stoop, along among many.

And yeah...I'm also frightened.

Bless This City: The Bank

2009-06-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

It's actually a credit union, but bank has less syllables.

Anyway, Coast Capital is the best. Not because they offer free accounts. Nor is it because of the unlimited (and free) debit card transactions. Nor is it that their facilities are uber-modern and pseudo-hip, lacking cubicles and utilizing the wide open space so everybody can see everybody.

No. It's the best because I heard the Grateful Dead playing softly on the P.A. while I waited to cash my cheque for $20. Casey Jones is still high on cocaine but now he's sharing it with the suits in Corporate Haven.

I wonder what Phil Lesh has to say about that.

Bottom Line: TD plays QMFM, which means more Faber Drive, which equals less of me.

Mikhail Lennikov

2009-06-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

It's an interesting story. He should probably be allowed to stay. He seems nice enough.

But that's not what I'm writing about. CBC online posted the story, of course, and the list of reader comments is insane. The "for deportation" arguments are by far the minority, which is the most interesting aspect of this story.

As dicky_barrett posted, "Canada was always a haven for people who sought peace from opressive forces." And with that, a national mentality of compassion and forgiveness has developed that makes Canada a unique and attractive place to live.

The arguments for deportation all seem naive and – I hate to speculate but I will anyway – probably the opinions of crusty Baby Boomers. Like this fellow, PeterAndTheWolf, who says: "Officer Lennikov's ability to shift blame is astonishing: someone else, but not him, should "explain to Dmitri". Infamous KGB trait - shifting the blame."

Well, it's easy to judge a man without knowing him. Also, shifting blame isn't exclusive to the KGB but all of humanity. Anyone with experience with children will know that.

But really, people are getting all riled up over this IDEA without ever knowing who this Lennikov even is. What does he do for a living here? Does he mooch of the social welfare or is he a law-abiding tax-payer? Does he like the taste of dog meat? Because if so, maybe he should be deported...

My point being that given the angle of media coverage, they seem to be asking for us to sympathize with this man. But we have no idea who he is or what he's all about.

Bottom line: Everyone is wrong, as usual.

Curse This City: Toilet Stalls

2009-06-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

I'm busy in the toilet stall of a local coffee house. It's covered with the usual sort of graffiti and faux-intellectual comments as any public restroom.

Then I see this nugget of wisdom: "ENVIRONMENTALISM IS THE FINAL REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL."

Which doesn't make much sense, of course, but it certainly provokes thought.

And then I read this: "Anglo Canada is IRRELEVANT," which is quite a silly thing to write next to a Vancouver 2010 sticker.

This leads me to believe that toilet stall inscriptions are the product of one of two things. Either:

1) all reason and logic are suspended while the body relieves itself, or

2) the average public restroom user is a moron.

I'm inclined towards the latter. Public restrooms are nasty, gnarly places that only weak in thought will consider using unless absolutely necessary. And that would explain this nugget of wisdom:

"Sitting in my pau-pau tree, will they make mango mush out of me?"

Bottom Line: toilet stalls make for great morning reading.

Conundrum #1

2009-05-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

What's more important: Hope or Trust?

Hope is holding on to the fact that Something might happen...

-while-

Trust is knowing that this Something is true...

Hope is airy. Trust is solid. Both are important. Which is better?

Tell me your thoughts.

World Peace

2009-05-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

We're a conflicted bunch. Always have been and, if history is any indication, always will be.

Life is fueled by drama – drama between nations, between neighbours, between siblings. The belief that we’ll all one day get along is absurd. Unless we program all newborns to eradicate from the cerebellum Jealousy, Hostility, Prejudice and the mother of all negativity, Fear, we’ll be coveting thy neighbour’s wife and getting even for it for-freakin'-ever. Whatever forever may be.

Even “peaceful” nations such as Canada can’t maintain a dispute-less order. Quebec has a been a constant thorn in the sides of legislators trying to develop a sense of unity and national pride – or, as the Quebecois see it, Anglophone Canada has been a prick in their ass while they try to develop their own national/cultural identity. Our nation was built on this conflict. Just as Europe’s foundation was built on one tribe tackling another. We’re slaves not only to our genetics, but to our history as well.

It will take something cataclysmic – like a race of superior alien beings threatening a nuclear strike – for us all to buck up, set aside our differences and work together to overcome this new obstacle facing us all on Planet Earth. Like in the Watchmen. Not the movie, the book. Read it! And read Bertrand Russell as well. He knows the score.

In any case, as it stands now, this pettiness we’re dealing with in racism and xenophobia and on and on and on is mere sibling squabbling on a very large scale. Humans (men especially) have a difficult time letting their influences, biases and pride subside to see the larger picture. We’ve developed in a particular way that doesn’t allow for us to take the Other into account. What is different is to be feared, and what is to be feared is to be overthrown, subdued or destroyed.

The bottom line is that humanity probably isn’t capable of harmony. On top of that, world peace would be boring. The arts would be banal. Journalism would be non-existent. Sport would involve a lot more hugging. Anything breeding conflict would be outlawed, which is exactly why it wouldn’t work. The act of Outlawing anything is an act of conflict in and of itself.

As Bertrand Russell once wrote: “[…]Evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”

And maybe he’s right. World peace is possible as long as we’re not around.

Libraria

2009-05-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

Libraria should be a word. I'm submitting this to Oxford.

LIbraria is, by definition: "The essence, air and reality within a library's subculture, made up of librarians, bookshelvers, circulation staff, janitorial workers and other employees of the facility."

It is a world unto itself. Librarians are its philosophers, professors and engineers. They have cultivated and perpetuated Libraria. The Chief Librarian is the chancellor of Libraria.

Bottom Line: it sounds too much like Liberia to be a real country.

Apple Sauce Container

2009-05-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

On the rock is the empty apple sauce container that Jonny the Photographer had ravaged and left for scraps a few moments earlier.

Because I'm carrying the empty beercans in my knapsack, and because the container is slimy with Jonny's saliva, I say: "I don't want to put that container in my bag." I look around but of course there are no garbage cans around here – not on this remote Gulf Island beach.

Jonny says: "We could let it float into the water with a little note in it. 'I am here, where are you?'"

"I like that idea. Let's do it!"

We didn't do it.

My Idea

2009-05-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

Yes, every day I will post a new idea. Some may be part of the Bless This City / Curse This City series. Others may be some random musing.

This way, I can build a readership that will check back every day for a fresh dose of nonsense.

And yes. This will get me rich.

Ideas

2009-05-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

The idea of New Ideas is to go as far with it as you can.

And milk it for all it's worth.

Once the teet is dry, find another and sell that one out as well.

And on and on we go.

New Toys

2009-05-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

Remember when you were young and Ma n' Pa bought you a new toy or a new bicycle?

And remember that inflated selfishness you felt over that new toy or bicycle, not allowing anyone else to touch it?

And remember how you couldn't let go of it – how you wanted to sleep with that new bike, to cuddle it all night long?

Did that end once you discovered masturbation?

Bless This City: A Kitsilano Bum

2009-05-16T02:06:00.000-07:00

A man in derelict clothing has his legs spilling onto the sidewalk. He's reading a Bryce Courtney novel, sipping from a Starbuck's cup and using another as a tip cup. Using the world as his lawn chair. Soaking in the sun while the rest of us pace back to work or the the grocery store or wherever. This isn't a downtown hobo. He's not even trying. This is something else all together.

Bottom Line: If you can read a novel, you can read the McDonald's janitorial handbook.

Bless This City: Japandroids.

2009-05-15T18:22:00.000-07:00

Pitchfork gave these local boys a glowing review and so I figured, meh, might as well check 'em out. I gave Post Nothing a listen and...meh.

Now, the Georgia Straight has run a feature cover story on the new 'Buzz Kings' detailing their recent cancellation of half their summer tour because of a near-death experience, their sudden blast of fame and all that jazz (check it out here). I figured, meh, I'll give it another listen. Taking bike ride along Point Grey Road. Sun beating UV bliss. Wind-blowing in my hair....aaaaaah.....

And the Japandroids are all fuzzy and free-wheelin' but serious about their fleeting youth and they're sleazy enough to make them fucking cool. And they're just as confused and frustrated by the times as everyone else their age. Just two guys working their asses off, paying their dues, feeling like it's not getting anywhere. They write and record create this brilliant epoynmous statement displaying that tension.

And so the Japandroids have Done It. For every city at a certain time, there is an album. Black Mountain pulled it off in 2005 with their debut. Now, we have Post Nothing for 2009.

Now, this city isn't void of crappy bands, by any means. SSRIs, Sex With Strangers, No Gold ( all playing at the Musical Waste festival in June – check the line-up here), and the mother of local indie rock, Black Mountain, are keeping Vancouver a haven for bright and progressive talent.

But now we have a new buzz ban, an act that – if all goes well – will put a good face on our music scene. "Oh, the Japandroids? They're from Vancouver, yeah?" And visa versa

I feel like a bandwagon jumper falling for them AFTER the buzz hits...like I should have known all along that this golden nugget was living in my very own city. But I had no idea that they existed. Better late than never, I suppose.

Bottom Line: I think Afghanidroids is cooler name, but whatever.

Quote of the Day

2009-05-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

"What's that in your hair?"
"It's meringue, I swear!"

Curse This City: Cocaine

2009-05-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

It's everywhere. Still. People at bars and parties slipping each other little flaps, giving each other handshakes on the sly.

At a party and people are leaving in threes down the stairs. On the sly, of course. Coming back up with bulging eyes and dilated pupils, black as Satan's bowels. Eyes relaxed and focusing on nothing. Grinding their jaws, slowly churning 'em. Lolling back their heads like they're struggling to keep them up while some forceful gust of wind is pinning them backward.

That goddamned cocoa. The definitive symbol of all that is rotten in this world. Right down to how it's harvested, in the blistering fields of rural Colombia. And these people are shoveling into their faces by the eightball.

"They're all high out there," I say to my friend, who is looking in the mirror in another room.

And I see a finger picking at the crust of the nostril and, maaaan, my face turns red.

See, I'm the weird one, isolating myself from the social circle because I hate that drug more than anything else on this planet. I have lost friends – and am in the process of losing others – because of it. I have seen the world through those eyes and it's a superficial landscape. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.

Bottom Line: I wasn't long for that partay.

Bottom Line: .

Hard Times: #1

2009-05-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

These days must be hard times for panhandlers. I saw one outside the liquor store the other day, sitting in a wheelchair, both palms open and placed on the armrest, I'm guessing to avoid unpleasant cramps in the wrist and forearm.

He asks: "Spare change."

And I say: "Sorry man. There's a recession on." I stop, open the door to the liquor store and say, "I'm probably as poor as you!"

It wasn't a nice thing to say, by any means, but I wasn't necessarily in the wrong. The truth is, the homeless have it easier in some ways. Not many ways, but some. First, most aren't restricted by any sense of decency. Second, they don't work – and judging by the frequency of sightings of certain individuals milling about Kitsilano, day after day – they have no ambition of seeking work. They live mostly off the kindness of strangers (and, maybe, the kindness of taxpayers in disability and welfare cheques).

But the Regular Folk (myself, you, you and you), are feeling the squeeze during this Economic Downturn. We have rent or mortgages to pay; car payments, gas bills, bus passes to purchase; at least one mouth to feed, three times per day. We don't have excess income to be spending on panhandlers.

Students and recent grads, single parents and the elderly are especially feeling strapped during this Economic Crisis – with limited government assistance, job loss at every corner, and a barren job market, most of us are living off of bread crumbs and birdseed. Well, I am anyway.

Jobs are very, very limited in Vancouver at the moment. Whatever openings there are, they're swallowed up immediately by a) an experienced Somebodies who've recently lost their jobs due to company cutbacks, b) someone with very decent connections, or c) someone else who isn't me.

So, yes. I am poor, as are many Canadians during this Economic Meltdown. I can barely afford toilet paper or dish soap. Do I have a dime to spare? Please.

Now, some of you may be asking, "Why are you buying booze when you can hardly afford to feed yourself?" And this is a fine question, though I must say it's none of your business.

But if I must answer, I will say that during an Economic Apocalypse, alcohol is one of the few human inventions that temporarily washes away any feelings of discontent, maladjustment or whatever and helps those of us get through the night (or day, depending on who you are).

Which is exactly why the wheelchair-bound-man and myself found ourselves outside of Darby's Cold Beer and Wine on a Monday night. Only I can barely afford my drink and he certainly can't at all.

Hard times, indeed.

Curse This City: the Canucks

2009-05-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

The final minute bleeds out into the double eggs and those of us still holdings brews are sipping feverishly to relieve the tension. To stave off the burgeoning sorrow.

And then the count was down. It was over: 7 - 5. Over and out. I could hear my father, 30 km or so away, cursing up a storm.

People throughout the bar start chugging back the last of their drinks. Others stare into the ether, lost in disbelief. We're all reassessing our commitments to this team – bandwagon-jumpers and fanatics alike. Faced with the what we've known all along – understood in our hearts without acknowledging it – that this team of ours are a pride of losers. The Canucks? Pffffffff...

The crowds around the tables wake from their daze. Slowly, they turn their neighbours. Engage in disheartened conversation. "I just wasn't ready for that yet," I hear someone say. "I know they wouldn't win, but I wasn't ready for it to end so suddenly."

Well cold turkey has slapped us all very hard. Now it's time to watch baseball.

Bottom Line: now we have to talk to each other at the bar.

But on the bright side....

Bless This City:

....when I asked the server for another pale ale, the bartender screwed up and poured two. She hands me one, comes back minutes later with another frosty glass of amber liquid and she says: "This is your lucky day," and only charges me for one.

"Yes. Too bad about the hockey game, though..."

And, also, when I had arrived at the bar, I locked my bike to a parking metre but the bastard wouldn't stay upright. Bound by gravity and those damned wheels. So I just left it lying on the sidewalk, like a toddler worn out after a tantrum.

When I checked on it hours later, some kind soul had picked it up and parked it the way it should have been. There it stood, gleaming in the setting sunlight, beautiful as ever.

Bottom Line: some stranger probably wants my bike.

Curse This City: Library Edition.

2009-05-11T14:44:00.001-07:00

It was already trickling but as I pass the Kitsilano branch of the Vancouver Public Library, the rain starts coming down in fat drops like translucent cockroaches.

I don't have a jacket on so I duck into the building. The powerful stench of B.O. slaps my face, fills my nostrils. It's warm. Sicly sweet. A dozen scrubby men fill the chairs and tables around the magazine section. The smell is overwhelming, no doubt emitted from two or more of these vagrant types – Kits residents who probably can't afford their rent.

The rain is beating heavy but the dark spot in the clouds is small, with rays of sun breaking up the cloud cover moving towards us. I walk around, look for a place to write, to wait out the downpour, but all seven desks in this cramped building are full. I look for some books by Bukowski, Updike, Rushdie. Nothing. Even the Nora Roberts collection is relatively shabby.

The smell wafts down to the back of the room, the Kid's Section. Poor kids, with their sensitive noses. This will no doubt form their impression of public libraries for years to come.

I finally find a seat at a desk between the cooking section and books about South American art. The chair leg wobbles when I move it closer to the desk and the pressure of my not-so-bulbous body threatens to topple this miserable wooden construction to the floor.

I'll brave the rain. The smell is too much. I get up to leave, scour the place for young women to ogle. There are only two: pne with meaty arms is teaching (who I believe to be) her grandpa how to do long division, and another is as skinny as an English lamp-post and dressed like a Montreal skid.

Bottom line: this library is totally useless.

See?

2009-05-08T11:24:00.001-07:00

See?

http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090508.wjobsapril0508/BNStory/Business/home

What has pessimism ever done for anybody...?

The Future Looks Good

2009-05-07T16:51:00.000-07:00

Listenin' to local radio this morning while driving around on errands. The lady with the nice voice said that the future looks good – according to an index by RBC, consumers in the US are optimistic about their futures and don't fear losing their jobs. This brings back spending that we all know we need in order to save ourselves from this dreaded financial apocolypse.

Well, of course the future looks good. We always work through ups and downs. It's like happiness. It's a mountain range. Haven't we learned that yet? Of course it won't stay bad forever – it's silly for anyone (media included) to tout that. It will get better at some point and then some time down the road, it will get bad again. And on and on it will go.

But WHEN it gets better this time around is another matter altogether...but Vancouver doesn't look that bad on the surface. Construction projects are still on the go. Two men were installing a sign at the base of the Arthur Lange Bridge leading towards YVR, which seems like a frivolous expenture, given the rough economic times. Nearby, VANOC installed a behemoth Olympic symbol facing the airport, and it couldn't have been cheap. Companies are still hiring new employees – and while certain sectors are chaffing their asses by cutting costs to keep afloat, the public sector, it seems, is having no trouble at all.

So that's good news.

On another note, there are NO NEW CASES of Swine Flu today.

And I sigh with relief...

BACK

2009-05-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's been way, way too long, I know.

A few notes: I'm graduated now. It's been incredibly tough finding work. This rotten economy has left all us newly-graduated feeding for scraps in the job market, foaming at the mouth with the whiff of possible job opportunity. With that, I've been dealing with the post-grad "What Now?" blues that many of us are undoubtedly feeling.

But enough about personal matters...

I'll be updating this blog semi-frequently. Stay tuned...?

On visiting

2009-01-07T18:45:00.001-08:00

We all wish to visit the spots that appeal to particular parts of our personalities. Every place has a romanticized appeal to a part of our character, and it's those parts of our character that we project on the city or country. This romance is fertilized with stories and descriptions acquired through the media or through people we know who've been there.

For example, I wish to visit San Francisco and imagine it a certain way (heady, free-lovin', very liberal, sunny all the time) even though the rational parts of myself understand that the whole city isn't like that – but if and when I do go there, I'll go to stroke off that portion of my personality. It will be either satisfied or disappointed, but whatever the result, I'll have a new understanding of myself.

So it goes...

Posts of Wisdom # Infinity

2008-11-13T20:38:00.000-08:00

You may laugh, if you wish.

Our lives are determined by where and how we were educated, and that follows all of us all along.

Love is easy. Maintaining it is not.

"How to not get cancer"

2008-08-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

Move away from the city.

Avoid resting laptops on your genitals.

Don't sleep in Park and Rides or bus terminals.

Beware of bluetooth devices attached to your skull.

Most importantly, avoid all physical contact with cancer patients because they're contagious.

Beheadings prove potent rib-ticklers

2008-08-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

Talk of beheadings have been non-stop around dinner (or bar) tables for the past week. Do you know why? Because a man was beheaded senselessly on the lonesome roads of Isolation, Canada on a Greyhound bus by an (alleged) wack job psychotic.

Yes.

And journalists have been analyzing what the public's relentless fascination of the story means for humanity -- i.e., that we love the gory details (in case you weren't aware); that we still do have the ability to be shocked (in case you weren't aware); and that we (according to Globe and Mail journalist Judith Timson) crave for more information, all the while feeling shameful about "our prurience." Humans love sex and violence. In case you weren't aware..

What's most fascinating to me is all the sick laughter flying around these dinner tables about the atrocity. Every single one of my conversations invariably resorts to some shameful (yet hilarious!) quip on the matter. I won't reiterate any of these for the (very few) people who actually read this blog because I can't remember a single one.

But what it says about the human condition is that we (e.g., myself, my associates and therefore every single individual, including the newborn, on the planet, ) don't have the capacity to deal with horrific situations by being deadpan. There's some deep-rooted urge in humanity to turn darkness to light and this is no different. It seems like we need to laugh so we can make sense of a world that consistently rears it's disfigured underbelly. Laughter is how I and the people around me deal with anything bad that rests on a massive scale: alcoholism, Republicans, ugly babies and now random beheadings.

This doesn't mean we're being insensitive. Or maybe it does, I don't know. But I think it's important for all of us to deal with this kind of news the only way they know how. For many of us, that's to laugh. Ugliness is easier to accept that way. It's similar to seat-belt resistance in a car accident. It cushions the blow.

That's why AIDs is funny.

Because George Bernard Shaw once wrote: , "Life does not cease to be funny when someone dies, as it does not cease to be serious when people laugh." This quote is now bordering on cliche, but it's apt and I'm lazy.

I'm not actually lazy.

And I've just been informed that AIDs isn't funny. Neither are ugly babies.

Say, did you hear that one about the guy on the Greyhound?

Wedding Gift, pt.1

2008-08-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

"Where's the wedding?"

"West 39th. Or something."

"Go get the invitation. Let me see it."

I shake my head, plopped myself between my folks on the couch.

"Come on! Do it, do it, do it!" pleaded my mother.

"Naw, I don't want to."

"You're boring."

"I'm too concerned that I have to get them a present. I have to give them like, what? $100?"

"No way! Bullshit. Give them, like, $25!" said my father.

Mother: "Nuh huh. One hundred. At least."

I sat there, staring at the tube, my folks bickering. I figured I'd ask my friends what they were going to give. It wouldn't matter anyway: I don't have $100. I'm broke right now -- so broke I shouldn't be hitting the bar this evening. 'Shouldn't' being the key word here...

Besides, it's not even like either the groom or the bride are good friends of mine. I mean, the groom's a s a buddy, I suppose. I've known him since high school...but it's not like we've had extensive heart to hearts late at night, revealing deep truths about ourselves over a six-pack and a late night Paul Newman flick. The price of a gift should be determined by how much time the two parties have spent together in the past year. Mack and I have spent, roughly, two hours together, and that's been in very large social settings.

Alas, this is not the way it is, and I refuse to get tangled in a Larry David moment.

Can you imagine? I buy a fancy card for $5.99 from Hallmark. Mack, the groom, opens it up and sees two crisp bills: one fiver and a twenty. He holds them between his thumb and middle finger, rubs them together and looks up at me with a cock eye. He holds them up for all in the wedding party to see and says: "Is this it?"

"Uh, uh, uh...."

And all my friends, acquaintances and potential lovers look at me in disgust for being such a poor sport and cheap bastard.

"It's his WEDDING day, you fuck head!" says the gorgeous 20-year-old I had been chatting up all night. She empties the triple gin and tonic, the one I had purchased for her only moments before, all over my chest --outlining my rippling pectorals.

"But, but, but --- I'm POOR! I've been TRAVELING for 7 months! I have no JOB!"

And they all proceed to BOOOOOOOOOOO me out of the reception hall.

Yes, I can see it now.

It looks as though I'm sending myself to the poorhouse over a wedding gift.

(to be continued...)

A conversation with rationality.

2008-08-01T18:17:00.000-07:00

So many beautiful ladies. Too many. In every store, walking up every block I drag myself along. And driving in my truck, axel squeaking, I try to make eyes but they are focused, up ahead, at something or the other. Or she might look my way but that fucking axel is squealing like a baby choking on a chicken bone so she quickly averts her eyes.

“You blame your squeaking axel for women not noticing you?”

Sure.

“Did you ever consider they just didn’t notice you? Or, perhaps, there’s something else going on inside their head that they didn’t notice another face in a vast parade of faces in fast moving motor vehicles?”

You’re not helping.

“Well…”

Look at this face! How can anyone miss this?

“I see.”

*Silence.*

“Look, the women in this city are notoriously callous.”

Callous? I’d say snobby.

“Well, yeah, that too. They don’t seem to notice anybody. My girlfriend rarely looks me in the eye. I think it’s the nature of all people in Vancouver. Don’t take it personally. The people here are a bit more….secluded than the average Joe.”

Average Joe…

“I didn’t mean it like that, Joe….”

What kind of therapist are you, anyway?

“I’m not your therapist. I’m your friend.”

But you are a therapist. Do you talk to them like this?

“You pansy. I’m talking to you like this because you’re my friend. And I’m not depending on your money.”

That’s disgusting.

“It’s a joke. Look, I’ve known you for – what – 24 years? 24 years. Shit…but yeah. 24 years, Joe. We know each other pretty well and I can tell when you need a good kick in the ass. Now, you need a good kick in the ass. You’re just sitting down on it, getting nowhere and bent out of shape because you’re not doing anything. And you’re thinking about how you’re not getting anywhere instead of thinking about how to get somewhere. I can’t tell you what to do, only you can.”

Yeah…

“And you better fucking get on it because you’re depressing the rest of us.”

On Love

2008-07-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

My buddy has girlfriend troubles. He says she can be emotional and that's fine. Yes. But he's weary and last night he laid his thoughts on me, thoughts I won't share with you now. Not for privacy's sake. Not at all. I just can't remember 'em...

But we're driving down a lonely road late at night. Dylan's aching voice his pushing through the mesh stereo speakers: "Sometimes it gets so hard to care, it can't be like this everywhere, and I'm gonna let you pass..."

"Fitting song," I said.

Buddy wasn't aware. Nope. He said: "I tell her I love her, even though she knows..."

"She knows...what?"

"Well, I just don't like throwing that word around."

"You don't like..." I grunted. "No one likes to throw it around. Man! That word's not thrown around ENOUGH. Love's simple. And always is. All LOVE means is that I feel fondly for this person and they're changing something about my insides. That's it."

"I know, but--"

"No, no. I love you man. I have fond feelings for you and you have shaped my insides in some way. People should say that more--it might open a lot of heads. I love and him and her and them. The only difference between romantic love and everyday love is the sexual impulses. That desire. That trip is romance. Without that, it's just love. Most people have this Hollywood notion of love or romance or whatever and it's fucking everything up.

He was silent for a minute, smirking, taking the motor vehicle up a steady hill. Finally, he said: "You should write an article on that. It could go a long way to explaining why people are so shut off in this city, or in this part of the world. It makes a lot of sense."

"Yeah? Well maybe I will."

And so I did.

2008-07-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

People can be so nice.

I went to McDonald's to buy a pop. I asked the manager lady: "How much is a small pop?"

She rang it up on the till, said: "One dollar, forty seven."

I opened my palm and scanned the measly change I was holding. One loonie. Lots of pennies. Not enough.

"Oh, never mind," I said and turned to walk away.

She stopped me though, said: "Don't worry about it. Just put the change in the donation box." So I did. And she gave me a small cup of delicious Coca-Cola.

And I wonder if I would have received the same treatment if I were ugly...

Some randomness

2008-07-08T12:38:00.001-07:00

It's been awhile. I'm not sure what I'm even saying here. It's more just a feeling I have throbbing somewhere inside. No thoughts, really. Haven't had much of those lately. My journal's been sitting at the bottom of my bag, collecting sand.

I don't know who this is for. No one seems to read this blog. But if there's anyone out there who does, who too feels vacant, well, 'you're not alone,' as they say. I'm around. Unfulfilled.

I've been away for six months. 4 of those were spent studying in England. The rest was spent traveling, whittling my time in foreign cities with amazing people who felt, for the most part, like they weren't fit for their homes. So they drifted about, living the world because that's all they--we--feel is necessary. To Live. It should be so simple. For short spurts of time, it can be. And it's happiness. And then real life resumes.

Yes. I'm filling in for vacation time at a local newspaper. They're hiring two reporter positions. I applied. I think I'm good at this work. But I can hear the editor calling people for interviews. I'm sitting in the back cubicle. There's no action over here. No one visits me. I get few calls. I'm not in the running. My chest swells and my eyes water a little but I've trained myself not to cry because there was a time when I felt that everything works out in the end. So why cry unless it's necessary? I trained myself not to cry before I realized that I have no idea if things "always work out in the end." I haven't seen the end. When the end does comes, I probably won't know if everything worked out because I won't be here to judge such a topic. All I know is that things go well and things go bad. And sometimes humans are happy and other times we are sad.

At this moment, I am sad. It is the first full emotion I have felt since I returned home. I will not deny myself this feeling, nor will I deny my happiness, nor my fear nor my depression. To deny any emotion is to deny our humanity. We have this range for a reason. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to live it and learn from it, to carry on with experience as some sort of evolutionary survival tactic.

I don't know what I'm doing. Ever. Just floating about and hoping for the best. Many of us do that. Maybe all of us.

Right now I'm typing so it sounds like I'm busy. But I'm not busy. I'm, 24 and wasting my time. People may not see it, but I am.

Over 11,000 Richmond citizens say NO!! to Turning Point plan

2008-04-20T06:37:00.001-07:00

The People vs. Turning Point

There was a sign on the door and it read: “Our children are not safe.” Some 800 people filed through those doors at Debeck Elementary in Richmond Dec. 1 of last year. Many of them were parents with children. As they all filed in, women handed out little stickers of a pink house in a circle with a line drawn through it like a non-smoking sign.

The rally was set up by the Caring Citizens of Richmond, a grassroots collective that banded together last May in opposition of Turning Point Recover Society’s proposed 32-bed residential recovery facility on Ash Street.

“We support this project but we ask them to maybe have it somewhere else,” said Vivian Hui, member of the Caring Citizens of Richmond.

Seven speakers that represented the neighbourhood’s various ethnic groups presented a variety of claims that such a facility would decrease property value in the neighbourhood, increase crime rates, pose a danger to the children, etc., all running up the fact that Turning Point is not welcome. There were no RCMP officers or addictions specialists at the meeting to clarify or verify any of their claims.

“These people have used all the wrong tactics to terrify people,” executive director of Turning Point Brenda Plant told the Straight at that meeting. “They’re already condemning us but they don’t really know what we do. All they know is that we provide services for drug addicts and people in recovery.”

“Our clients are not court ordered, they’re not criminals, they just have problems—just like everyone in this room has a problem,” she said.

“The so-called Caring Citizens of Richmond will tell you that it’s just numbers and it’s density,” said Michael Goehring, former president of the board of directors, “but everything else they say, in terms of their materials and their rhetoric, indicates there’s a discriminatory attitude towards people with addiction and substance abuse issues.”

Turning Point has offered residential recovery for addicts seeking treatment for 25 years in Vancouver and Richmond with no complaints or increased criminal activity. These claims supported by both the RCMP and Vancouver Police Department—although VPD spokesperson Jana McGuiness said tracking crime growth in areas with treatment facilities would be too difficult assess because “crime is everywhere.”

Turning Point might have the advantage of Bill 23 in B.C.’s legislature to help them out. As of April 9, the provincial health bill may require cities and towns to set aside space for services for people with addictions or mental disabilities. While the bill doesn't specifically mention the Turning Point proposal, it imposes a requirement on municipalities to ensure that people with addictions don't all have to leave town to get help.

Bill 23 states that the health minister can “require that a community planning process be undertaken to address the needs of the population within the community.” This has already been done at a municipal level in Richmond, through the 2001 Group Home Task Force recommendations. The Task Force states, among other things, that a neighbourhood consultation is necessary in the planning process. Turning Point held one the week before Caring Citizens held their rally, but none of the 390 people who attended seemed to take it too seriously—according to both Plant and Goehring, many of them showed up to argue the necessity for such a treatment facility in their neighbourhood.

In the meantime, there are currently 130 people on the waiting list for Turning Point in Richmond, many of them women with children. The nine beds at the society’s Odlin Road facility are for men only, leaving nothing for women and no supportive housing units for recovering addicts once they complete the program. Plant says many of these people end up seeking treatment in the Downtown Eastside or they fall back into their old addiction-supporting environments.

This is what makes the Ash Street proposal so unique: clients will have both levels of care on the same piece of land.

Richmond city staff are currently reviewing Turning Point’s application for 20 support recovery beds, 10 for men and 10 for women seeking recovery from substance abuse; one care-taker suite; and 11 self-contained affordable housing units—which Turning Point says are for clients who’ve already completed the program and need extra help with independent living and integrating back into society.

If the application is rejected, the province’s new legislation could open the door for the society to file a judicial-review application and obtain a court order forcing Richmond to reconsider such a decision.

Vancouver Coastal Health’s 2006 “Mental Health and Addictions Supportive Housing Framework,” states that supportive housing should be spread throughout the city to “support individuals to stay in their own communities and to avoid any over concentration in particular areas.”

Dr. Christian Rucker, an addictions specialist based out of Vancouver General Hospital who works with Turning Point patients once a week, says spreading treatment facilities around residential neighbourhoods could give addicts a chance to escape the cycle of addiction in areas like the DTES and Whalley in Surrey.

“The most important part of managing addiction is a social treatment of taking these people out of isolation and giving them a new life and reintegrating them meaningfully in society,” says Dr. Christian Rucker. “I see the recovery movement as incredibly important in that.”

“Turning Point works because we’re in community,” Plant says. “Addiction is a disease of shame and isolation and our job here is to reintegrate these people back into community. It’s not to further shame them by putting them out on a farm somewhere. They are members of the community and they have every right to be in their home community and to get the services that they need and want.”

Residential treatment, with its rigid structure and ongoing support, acts like a community within a community. Instead of a lifestyle revolving around addiction, facilities like Turning Point offer a lifestyle that revolves around people in recovery. It’s a dose of sobriety for many of the patients who come in mentally and spiritually exhausted and desperate for change. The facilities won’t allow a client who might put the staff at risk. In a way, the staff acts as watchdogs for the neighbourhood; if the staff is safe then so are the neighbours.

Turning Point’s model of treatment is just one type of treatment on a continuum of services for people with substance abuse problems. Vancouver council is currently focusing on supportive housing with a whole continuum for people with addictions and mental health issues to stabilize their lives and re-connect with the community. Vancouver’s drug policy coordinator Don McPherson says all 650 of Vancouver Coastal Health’s proposed supportive housing units will be spread throughout the city in every neighbourhood within the next 10 years.

Never mind treatment, the people need education

Ernie Mendoza’s speech was greeted with noisy cheers and applause on Dec. 1. He’s held in rather high regard amongst Richmond residents, it seems. The Caring Citizens of Richmond chair represents the some 12,000 people who oppose the Turning Point’s proposal. He’s been the most assertive and aggressive in his approach to fight the project, claiming that because Turning Point has never run a 32-bed facility, they’re setting the community up for calamity. He believes that such a facility will subvert the nature of the largely Chinese-and-family-oriented neighbourhood.

“A large institution like this does not fit in the community,” he says. “It is not compatible of the nature of the community.”
Richmond’s 2001 Group Home Task Force—which was formed after Turning Point opened its first facility on Odlin Road—recommends that a group home can house no more than 7-10 beds and must be located on a thoroughfare (meanwhile, same Task Force also suggests that a “negative impact on home values is unlikely”). In Mendoza’s opinion, the residents will oppose anything of that size, even if it were a 32-bed convent.

“It is not logical that, for example, if you were to take [an] area, and right in the middle of that area, you build a zoo. It doesn’t work. It is not logical. It is not useful. It does not fit into the area,” he says.

But many of the arguments that Mendoza and the Caring Citizens of Richmond are projecting are common with inadequate risk communication, according to UBC psychology professor Richard Mathias. The perception that they present is more a manifestation of prejudice than of risk, due in part to the stereotype of DTES drug addicts as “bad people.”

“This is a classic case of risk communication maybe not being carried out as well as it might on either side,” says Mathias.
He believes it’s the responsibility of the experts to provide the public with the necessary information and laying it out clearly to assure people that controversial projects won’t be to the detriment of the community. This is not being done as effectively as it could be, he says, even though research indicates that treatment facilities have very little negative impact on the surrounding communities.

“If we gave them a much better feel of how treatment and management of drug addiction actually works in these kinds of settings, maybe they would become more familiar with it. With familiarity comes less of this irrational type prejudice that seems to be occurring,” he says.

“If we don’t address those things, then we can’t expect to influence the perceptions of the people who are carrying out the many complaints.”

Vancouver Coastal Health’s 2006 “Mental Health and Addictions Supportive Housing Framework,” states that comprehensive community engagement and education is vital for the city to “move forward with the maximum understanding, support and involvement from those parties who may feel they will be impacted.”

But Mathias believes the responsibility of education shouldn’t be laid squarely on the shoulders of organizations like Turning Point. They typically don’t have the risk-management skills necessary to deal with the usual backlash of a subverted status quo. The information needs to be provided for the public by public officials—respected members of the community like the RCMP, the municipality and the health authority—who believe that controversial projects are beneficial to the greater good.
Instead, the “system” has let Turning Point take the lead on the project and has unwittingly instilled a fear within the community.

“It’s easy to rile up a crowd and get, you know, 500 people to come out by publishing a leaflet that says all these horrible things are going to happen to you and your neighbourhood if this facility gets built,” Don McPherson says.

Public education usually only happens once the hysteria gets worked up. The education then takes place under volatile conditions. But with the province now backing public consultations in regards to Bill 23 there may now be adequate resources available to stem many of the public’s fears immediately and address the concerns rationally.

“There should be more focus on how stigmatizing these kinds of health problems is not productive and is in fact counterproductive to them and communities being healthy communities,” McPherson says.

He believes media accounts of illegal drugs over the last hundred years have been largely responsible in creating a “lightening rod for people’s fears” when it comes to users of cocaine and heroin.

12,000 people have signed a petition against Turning Point based on these notions feeding the public’s fears. The Caring Citizen and their faceless cyber affiliate NIABY (Not In Anyone’s Backyard) are using of what Michael Goehring calls “guerilla tactics” ensure that many of those people sign without knowing the true facts of what Turning Point is all about.

Ernie Mendoza was the last to speak at the December meeting. He taunted Turning Point for their “lack of credentials” and their supposed inability to maintain a facility of the proposed size.

He told the crowd: “You represent an incredible collective energy that can move mountains!” and the crowd cheered.

He said: “However, if that mountain refuses to move, you can use your ultimate weapon of mass decision—your ballot, next November!” More whoops and hollers.

Michael Goehring, former chair of the Turning Point’s board of directors, stood at the side, shaking his head. At one point he said at a minimal volume: “Shame on you.”

To which someone in the audience cried back: “No, shame on you!”

And then Mendoza said: “Turning Point fails to demonstrate clear accountability and responsibility to clear the doubts of every citizen concerned about their plans. Ladies and gentlemen, today you have spoken. And you’ve given us an overwhelming decision—to turn down this proposal!”

Mendoza thrust his microphone in the air as the crowd whistled and booed. He stood there smiling. Sweating. Beaming. The crowd cheered for a minute before erupting into a thunderous chant of “No! No! No! No!” with percussive clapping and more screaming and they all streamed out of the auditorium. Their message was clear. Turning Point isn’t welcome.

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Reflection

This story isn’t as balanced as it should be. Truly objective journalism is a myth—or so says I—but I do try to offer both perspectives when I’m writing on topics of public debate.

I had trouble with doing it this time around. It was rather difficult to include the perspectives of the Caring Citizens of Richmond—the self-identified NIABY’s (Not in Anyone’s Back Yard)—because many of their arguments were based on opinion disguised in rhetoric centred on stereotypes rather than on the realities of drug-treatment. Their concerns for the safety of their children and their neighbourhood are absolutely valid, but from what I’ve witnessed talking to some of these people and being a resident of the neighbourhood, it’s been really difficult for me to take their scare-mongering seriously. And, thus, the article has a particular bent.

So, yeah, I live three doors down from the proposed site. My parents hate the idea. My brother has threatened to burn the facility down once construction gets under way. My sister and I (well, I, mostly) have instigated voluminous arguments at family dinners about whether a drug rehabilitation facility is necessary in our community. I absolutely believe that it is and I’d be more than happy to accommodate and welcome anybody with such an illness who is fighting to get better into my neighbourhood. My parents…well, they don’t like it so much.

And the discussions, er, arguments that are taking place within my home are reflective of the arguments taking place outside. It’s an important discussion for any community to have—where they stand on addiction, so we can all come to an understanding to what the status quo is—and I’m happy to have been a part of it.

Researching and writing this story has helped me understand my own position on where I stand with drug recovery, where it’s located and why it’s necessary. I enjoyed researching it. I met some very interesting people—addicts, former addicts, people who hate addicts, people who have the interests of society in mind but can’t seem to agree on what societies interests should be, and people who care only about themselves.

I wanted to write a story about the NIMBY people vs. the rehab people—a good vs. idiotic type of story. As I started investigating the issue and as the humanity if it all unfolded, I realized it wasn’t so black and white. There were good and bad people on both sides. Idiots inhabit every cranny of our fair society, as do the intelligent ones. It’s like anything, really—bad people are attracted to everything, so long as it can serve their selfish purpose. And I saw that in the Turning Point issue—selfish people on both sides.

But in the end, I wrote the best story I could in defense of Turning Point. Richmond, and the whole of Metro Vancouver, desperately needs more facilities. Turning Point is needed, as I see it, and I’m the one writing the story. There’s a lot at stake here, more than just a neighbourhood. Addiction is everywhere, in every neighbourhood, in and around Vancouver. It’s a sad reality and the people who propel misinformation with false stereotypes and scare-mongering aren’t solving the problem.

Supporting Material

Note: I started work on this story before I arrived in the UK, and many of my source materials, from newspapers and documents, were acquired while still in Canada.

Interviews:

1) Brenda Plant, executive director of Turning Point Recovery Facility, during a Dec. 1 rally held by the Caring Citizens of Richmond opposing Turning Point’s proposal. I also talked to her during a tour through Turning Point’s recovery facility on Odlin Road in Richmond later that month.

2) Michael Goehring, former chairman of Turning Point’s board of directors, in several interviews—one at the Dec. 1 rally, a second at a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver and a third during a tour of Turning Point’s two recovery facilities on W. 13 Ave. in Vancouver—all between December and January.

3) Ernie Mendoza, Caring Citizens for Richmond chair and president of Kumon Happy Learning Centre in Richmond, at his office at Kumon in January.

4) Vivian Hui, CCR member, at the Dec. 1 rally.

5) Bob Harrison, CCR member, at the Dec. 1 rally and several days later at Blenz Coffee in Richmond.

6) Dr. Bruce Alexander, Simon Fraser University professor and drug-treatment researcher, in a phone interview.

7) Jana McGuiness, Vancouver Police Department spokesperson, in a phone interview.

8) Nycki Basra, Richmond RCMP spokesperson, in a phone interview.

9) Linda Reid, Richmond East MLA, at her office in January.

10) Dr. Christian Rucker, addictions specialist, at an interview at Vancouver General Hospital in January, as well as a phone interview.

11) Dr. Richard Mathias, professor of psychology at University of British Columbia, in a phone interview.

12) Don McPherson, city of Vancouver drug policy coordinator, in a phone interview.

13) Vince Battistelli, Executive Director of Richmond Addiction Services and George Passmore, Director of Clinical Services, in a joint interview at the office in January.

Primary Source Material:

1) Bill 23 – 2008, Public Health Act, British Columbia Legislative Assembly
2) 2001 Richmond Group Home Task Force Recommendations
3) Vancouver Coastal Health’s 2006 “Mental Health and Addictions Supportive Housing Framework”
4) Numerous Richmond News and Richmond Review articles and letters to the editors. Some of these can be found in the Richmond News archives, if they’re working, at Canada.com/Richmond news (note: Canada.com has had some problems in the past with their archives.)
5) Turning Point’s facts and figures, applications for rezoning, distributed as a media kit by the society at the Dec. 1 rally.
6) Economic Benefits of Drug Treatment: A Critical Review of the Evidence For Policy Makers; Belenko, Steven; Patapis, Nicholas; French, Michael T.; for Treatment Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania.
7) BC Chamber of Commerce on Addiction
8) Turning Point’s Cost of Substance Abuse in B.C.
9) Letter to Richmond Mayor Malcom Brodie from Ernie Mendoza

Online sources/forums/websites:

1) niaby-richmond.com - /apps.niaby-richmond.com/Forum/message/index.cfm?topicGroupID=2478&topicID=2149&messageID=0&start=0&last=0
2) niaby.com
3) Turningpoint.com
4) http://www.richmond.ca/services/socialplan/housing/group/taskforce.htm

Note: for a city that’s supposedly wed-savvy, finding online forums and web sources for Vancouver addiction recovery was surprisingly difficult. Much of my research consisted of phone interviews and emails where sources provided me with documents I couldn’t find on the web.

Fly, Moses, Fly!

2008-03-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

A (great) headline: 'Thou shalt take drugs, Moses...' And then a sub-head: 'Religious visions "were hallucinations."'

The article detailed claims made by Israeli researcher Benny Shanon that Moses was under the influence of psychedelics when he saw visions of God in the burning bush. Moses may also have been tripping when he received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Shanon theorizes that many of the stories in the Old Testament are actually recorded experiences with the drink Ayahuasca, a very powerful hallucinogen containing DMT. The Guardian reports he noticed that many of the descriptions in the Bible were very similar to encounters he had with the drink 15 years ago. Indeed, encountering the divine is a very common experience while under the influence of the drug, which is still used to this say by Amazonian shamanic tribes. The plant, Shanon says, is derived from roots and plants that grow in the Holy Land and the Sinai peninsula.

But anybody who's ever taken a psychedelic and/or has a single athiestic molecule in his/her body has probably considered this at least one, and not just about Moses. Alternative thinkers, hippie dreamers and 'atheists' in the eyes of many have claimed Jesus, too, may have been under the influence of some such substance. And Ezekial's flying wheel? That bastard was tripping.

This notion is not all that far-fetched a concept, though it is likely to offend a certain sector of the earth's population, i.e., dedicated scholars and narrow-minded zealots. But primative and ancient cultures have used mind-altering substances as an avenue for seeking the divine for thousands of years, looooong before the current perspective of drugs had become the norm. The roots and plants used to make Ayahuasca are found in the Holy Land and the Sinai Peninsula. 'Drugs' were a very different issue when Moses was rocking out: they were sacred rites for accessing hidden dimensions of consciousness inhabited by our spiritual superiors. It sounds a bit quacky, I know, but many of the world's religions are based on this primitive practice--including Hindu and the ancient drink Soma, all shamanic religions and quite possibly Judaism, according to Shanon. Substances like Ayahuasca and peyote, among other, have historically been used to access mystical portals in the psyche.

But message boards on hyper-Christian websites like BibleGateway.com have been dominated by angry posts by people who KNOW Moses was not a 'druggie' and that these 'athiests' should 'read the bible,' fueled by that backwards notion that all drugs are the devil's fruit. But wait, pious scholar! Check this Exodus ditty that God supposedly said to Moses:

34 Take fragrant drugs -- stacte, and onycha, and galbanum -- fragrant drugs and pure frankincense; in like proportions shall it be.

35 And thou shalt make it into incense, a perfume, after the work of the perfumer, salted, pure, holy.

36 And thou shalt beat [some] of it to powder, and put [some] of it before the testimony in the tent of meeting, where I will meet with thee: it shall be unto you most holy.

Sounds like some potent shizz to me, son...

To lump all drugs into the same basket is like comparing apples to McDonalds. There's no question that crystal meth and heroin are soul-suckers, obliterators of the spirit. Cocaine too. Take a walk down Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and you'll see. Bad news bears.

But there is little evidence to suggest that, say, LSD is all that harmful to the human body, beyond media reports of worst-case-scenarios and legislative fear-mongering at the peak of the 60s. But to those that are open to it, and who are brave enough, and who use it responsibly (to the extent that drug use can be 'responsible'), psychedelics or ethneogens or whatever you call them can be a rather beneficial experience. Even light trips will make the individual more aware of their relation to the cosmos, more sensitive to the life's little coincidences. These are spiritual encounters on a much lower level. A grazing of divinity's cheek.

Of course, all these substances play on the peaks and lulls of the human condition, so while they can be an exhilirating and positive experience, they can also be quite damaging too. All these drugs--psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT, even cannabis and the list goes on--are a wildly unpredictable bunch. You never quite know what'll happen. Those horror stories you've heard are true but they are not the only stories.

But ANYWAY, most people today seeing God in burning bushes or in waterfalls or in the bellies of large mammals are either higher than heaven or crazy. Or both. Usually both. But prophets do still exist, usually in the form poets or artists. And, yes, artists and poets and all the other though- and culture-shifters and -makers have been using mind-altering substances all along, always and forever, to gain insight into the spiritual and the humane. Lennon was on drugs. Coleridge was on drugs. Shakespeare was on drugs. Moses...I wouldn't be suprised. If anything, it's more likely that he would have been high. He was a less evolved specimen. Think about it.

The fact that Planet Earth's three major belief systems have been predicated on the story of Moses and the mythologized version of who he was means the benefactors of these systems of thought--Muslim, Jewish and Christian--will dismiss Moses 'drug habits' without much consideration. But remember kids, their version of what's true is only theirs--it just happens to be one of the oldest, the most accessable and of the most influential.

Unfortunately, these religions regard drug use--ALL drug use--equally to rape or thievery. To find that over 3000 years of history was shaped by a particularly inspiring trip in the desert would mean that their current versions of what's what who's who are threaded with some serious bullshit. Islamic law would have to reconfigure. The US would have to revamp it's entire action plan. It would be the end of the world as we now know it.

Maybe this is the Apocalypse. Fly, Moses, fly!

The problem with British journalism

2008-03-06T04:21:00.000-08:00

A front-page headline: 'Patrick Swayze Has 5 Weeks To Live!'

But then every other headline on the newspaper rack reads something different. He has cancer but he's not dying. He may die but he's well enought to work. It's offensive--ney, depraved--to scream the tragic details of someone's unfortunate circumstance in oversized block letters to garner readership--especially when the facts may not even be true.

The Globe and Mail, Canada's faithfully objective newspaper, simply states Swayze's 'battling pancreatic cancer,' with there's no speculation of when or if he'll die. Indeed, the Liverpool Daily Echo (who do practice the unfortunate British tradition of editorializing news stories) reports Swayze's publicist dismissed the 'five-week' claim.

Now, I don't give a fuck about Patrick Swayze beyond the fact that he's a human being like (presumably) you or I. I'm only using him as an example because it's the most recent in what I see as the problem with British journalism. Many (not all, but many, many) of these British papers routinely bend the truth, blatantly distort facts with no reservations of who they offend or how they affect anything, only sell more papers. The industry is so saturated with reading material in this country--most of it absolute garbage--that 'news' papers must resort to sensationlizing lies to swindle more readers. Who are these editors? Did they decide on journalism to add to the insurmountable idiocy of the Western world ? Or maybe the jading realities of the business corrupted their once idealistic spirits and they are now taking it out on the rest of us. Or (most likely) the bosses want more money.

Not all papers are like this but it's very telling when the Sun, the ultimate in tabloid schlock, is the country's #1 paper. On the other hand, it is quite endearing that several of these papers, Sun included, feature the perky bare breasts of young vixens on page 3 every issue. It's a fine way to start the day, let ME tell YOU. If only there were a way to feature tits and respectable journalism in one publication. The fact that it doesn't exist is Britain's biggest problem. Bar none.

While scribbling

2008-03-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

I was scribbling in my notebook about Moses being stoned, high up on that mountaintop on a train back from Liverpool. I stopped , put my pen down and the woman sitting across from me asked: "Are you writing a book?

"One day. But I'm a journalist for now."

"You're a bit young to be a journalist, aren't you?"

I shrugged, jotted something down.

"I dabbled myself, you know," she said, etching the air with her finger to illustrate what she meant. "It's nice to see something, to scribble it down."

I shrugged again. "It's more of a disease for me. But I'm writing a story about the Beatles for a paper back home, cramming as much Beatles tourism in a day as I can. It's a travel story."

She nodded, said: "I lived through the birth of the Beatles, you know. I wasn't actually there--I'm from Manchester, out that way--but I grew up with it. Grew up with them in the 60s. It was really quite exciting."

I love meeting these people, ex-hippie types, the nostalgic misfits of a time my generation can only fathom through the music and photo stills and our imaginations. I smirked. "So you lived through the 60s?" She nodded. "How was that?"

She smiled, gazed out the window at the rolling green passing us by. She had the wrinkled, weathered face of a person who had, indeed, been there. She went there again, just for a moment. She came back and said: "It was alright, you know. People seem to think of it as quite daring but when you look back, it's not nearly as bad as what we have now, in Britain anyway. These people getting all drunk and beating each other up..."

"When you think about it, maybe all that LSD they were taking was better than all this booze they have now."

She nodded and gazed out the window again. "It was wonderful then. Really."

"I see then as the beginning of the world we have now. The catalyst for all this degeneracy, the bullshit" I said. I didn't realize I felt that way until it came out. And there it was. She nodded. She agreed with me.

"It'll come full circle again," she said. "It can't stay this way forever."

"Sure. It's going to happen sooner than later, I think. We can all feel it...building. Something's got to give. It's kind of scary when you think about it." I paused, said: "It could be better than what we have now."

"It better be, anyway," she said. She kept talking but I zoned out. The train was approaching Preston station and I gathered my belongings, bundled them in my lap.

I came back, listened to her say: "..I'm not a religious person by any means. I'm bit of everything..." I nodded. I zoned out again, I noticed the book she was reading. Cosmic Ordinance. My innards stirred. I felt something building, a climax of sorts. The train pulled up, stopped and I got up to leave. She remained seated, probably on her way to Blackpool.

And then she said: "...it's like Moses with the burning bush, up there on the mountain--"

I cut her off, said: "Do you have any idea what I was just writing about? Moses! I was writing about Moses, on the mountain!"

She smiled and her eyes twinkled up at me. She tapped her book with a finger, tapped her temple three times. "Good luck to you," she said.

"Yeah." I stumbled out to the platform, head stirring. I found the closest seat and started scribbling.

Burger King Nation

2008-03-03T05:56:00.001-08:00

That'll be four-nineteen, the manager said.

You don't do onion rings here, do you?

A side of onion rings?

I nodded.

That'll be five-nineteen, she said.

She held out her palm. The tattoo on her inner wrist said take.

I gave her my money.

A Party in Hell

2008-02-26T07:51:00.000-08:00

There's this French party, a party in hell, with hundreds of international kids speaking languages I can't understand. So I'm the Alien.

It's not an aggressive scene or even rowdy but it's loud and pushing through the narrow corridors in this fucking maze of a house—a slithering mass of inebriated students, smoking and drinking and spilling, from the back kitchen and smoke pit, through all these bodies lining the corridor and down the stairs, to the cellar-turned-electro-dancehall. Back and forth, back and forth we go.

The dancehall—dark and sweaty and low ceilings and pillars standing in the way like catatonia and I move my hips and beat my fist on the ceiling to the pulse, the restless rhythm with all the beautiful Spanish. And one, maybe French, pure erotic, the way she sways through her world and twirls around mine and his and hers, pure electric sex ‘n’ slender eyes ‘n’ long legs ‘n’ body ‘n’ hair black as the corner of the cavern and mmmmmmmmmmm …

I move on upstairs with another round of exiles, always another end to the mass moving through the mob. Pushing through the smoke, the clanging bottles and all these accents and languages. Get caught up with someone I know along the way. And again. And again. And George the Canadian clangs my bottle, said: “Y’know, if a fire broke out no one would make it alive.” My God! No windows! Two exits! So I move to the back, to the kitchen, across to the smoke pit just for some air. Yet pure oxygen is hard to come by with the billowing of carcinogenic clouds proliferating about and above the brick walls. Up, towards the row of apartments with lamp -light beaming through closed blinds. Patrick the Polish sees this, and in broken English, warns the pooolice arrh cahming but I brush it off because the English understand parties. Bless your soul, Patrick, but they’d never call the cops, forget it Patrick.

And I go back in to push and slither with the rest and try to talk, maybe converse, but no one understands because they’re French or German or whatever, it doesn’t matter, I’m the Alien. So I move on and on just to do it again because the pushing and the slithering is half the fun…

...until mid-journey and 3:30 am there are two lady officers in neon and silly hats, pigs sliding through the Spanish clogging the corridor. One asks me: “Whose house is this?” and she asks another, and another, and another but nobody knows, of course not! Who would? So the two pushed on, toward the stairs, all official and obtuse in their neon and the leader, the speaker, mumbles into her radio: “We’re in the party. We’re in the party.” She looks down the stairs at all these kids moving on up with matted hair and red eyes and that damned understanding that the neon’s arrived. An officer turns, asks no one in particular: “What’s down here?” “DANCING.” Of course!

The pigs move down and Michael the French—or maybe Spanish?—offers to show them someone who lives at the house. “But what’s the problem?” he asks. “The problem is I need to speak to the owner.” And someone yells “Fuck the police!” like someone always, always will in times like these and when every around goes sssshhhhhhhhhhhhh, shut the fuck up, shut UP! we have no one to thank but NWA.

And before very long I’m outside and eight other cops, men in their hats, are managing the party as it’s spilling outside. And back in, through the corridor, a tall one, a proper pig, is yelling: “Everybody out! Everybody out!” and maybe thinking exactly what I was thinking, maybe, that what a fire hazard this party had become! A windowless maze with cigarette ash mashed into the carpet, burns on the walls, smoke filling all empty space not occupied by human bodies. If ever a fire broke out…

“Everybody out!"

And so here we are, hundreds out front, an international loitering mess chattering away in all these languages while the pigs search the house for drugs. We’ll all be charged if they find anything illegal, or so says Vlad the Russian. It's nonsense, of course, but I leave anyway before the house has been hollowed. I leave with some Estonians.

Map Assignment

2008-02-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

This is a map for an assignment. Yah huh.

View Larger Map

Submarine of Love

2008-02-19T07:39:00.000-08:00

A friend said he hates the Beatles. I asked why and he sang: “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

And then he said: “What rubbish.”

It's his problem, not mine. I’ve met a few of these nescient buggers and they typically reference “Yellow Submarine” as a testament to the Beatles’ alleged overrated legacy. I argued with my dear friend. I got flustered, red in the face. I questioned how I could be friends with this man to begin with. What a shame! that the Beatles should be remembered for that song by so many of the uninitiated, the world over. Of all the wit and insight and infectious melodies the Beatles brought, of so many (so many!) songs, “Yellow Submarine” is the staple.

On the other hand, Revolver, the 1966 album on which "Yellow Submarine" was originally released, deserves to be remembered as the essential Beatles album. It was arguably their last display as a tight functioning unit, before egos and drugs and money got in the way of all that the love. Revolver was the album that funneled their past, swirled it in Tibeten philosophy and new heartbreak and LSD and a new social consciousness and spewed them forward into their future. I’ve memorized every chord, lyric, hidden sound in the sonic foray of that entire album and the only song I could never fully embrace was “Yellow Submarine.” It’s a silly, childish song…

...and it dawns on me, discussing with my friend, that this exactly why the song is a classic. It's silly! Childish! Juvenile whimsy is what made the Beatles so damned loveable to begin with. Watching those old black and white clips of their first visit to America is like seeing four kid brothers farting around with each with all who were watching. They were in a bubble all their own. Life at that time was like their own private joke.

They could be lyrically downbeat in those early days—remembering lost love, girlfriends being untrue or whatever—but “I’m Down” could have been a far more depressing affair if it weren’t for that potent youngster energy surging through the song. The Beatles had a way of making a broken heart sound so gleeful. They didn’t just write songs, they played with them and “Yellow Submarine” was the apex of that. They were stoned and probably quite giddy when it was written. They had the world hanging by locks of flowing dippy hair in 1966 and they crafted a 2:38 minutes of aural juvenility with which the whole world could sing along.

But the song isn’t representative of the Beatles’ catalogue as a whole. To base one’s attitude of any artist solely on one song or painting or poem is like writing off all ice cream because you don’t like bubblegum. Songs like “Taxman”, “Blackbird”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “A Day in the Life” are incomparable in their sound, in their depth. There’s a thematic and philosophical thread running through these songs and, like "Yellow Submarine," they're important nuggets in the group's oeuvre but they exist on different levels of the band's understanding of their primary subject: that is, love as a governing force. How it affects the human psyche. How it affects the whole of humanity and how we're all in this obnoxiously bright sea vessel of existence together. "All together now... "

This is part of what makes the Beatles so appealing to so many people in so many places. This must also be why certain souls can't latch so easily. Maybe they feel love is at a loss. Or childhood is a pain. Or fun is strictly for weekends. Whayever. If they don't want in on the Yellow Submarine that’s their problem. Not mine.

The Warehouse

2008-02-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

a)

I felt England this weekend at the Warehouse, Preston’s three-floor testament to alternative culture. It’s a dog’s fart compared to the London scene but that city’s imprint is still undeniable in the North, especially with regards to the hair.

The Hair. Cut to look shaggy but combed and styled to perfection. A man’s hair should never be combed—nature should have its way with his scalp, show the world the beasts we really are. Limited finger manipulation is acceptable and maybe a little product for the truly unfortunate. But these cool kids? With the super slim jeans? What the hell…?

The hipster elitists were there. They’re easy to spot. They want to be. They don’t dance. They sip drinks on the side. They have the Hair and a fine-tooth fashion sense. Expressionless faces. Some wear ties. Cardigans. Flannel. Middle Eastern scarves—the ones everyone wears, the kind I’m wearing now.

I’m no stranger to hipster snobbery—Vancouver is full of it. But back home the ‘cool kids’ model themselves after the British elite. They think it’s original but I know, the outsiders know, and surely the cool kids themselves know, on some level, it’s just hand-me-down chic they pass off as original. But Snooty Bohemian is what they are so they own it. I don’t blame them. Vancouver doesn’t have much that’s its own.

It’s different in the UK. England made this style. They arguably have one up on New York when it comes to fashion. There’s nothing self-conscious about these UK hipsters—they seem to believe they really are the Hot Shit. And maybe they are…to some regulating entity that dictates this kind of thing.

Maybe they feel they’re original or offbeat—and perhaps as individuals they are. But as a mass, they’re only drifting along the same shallow stream of culture like the rest of us. Whether they’re of a different school or class or culture or whatever doesn’t really matter—they’re just like everyone else in that they’re only interested in something. That really doesn’t mean much in terms of our humanity. What sets them apart is that their pretentiousness turns them into assholes in the eyes of everyone else looking in.

I should have been partying or dancing instead of gawking at these hip freaks in their leather jackets, thinking about all this. I was leaning against a wall and wishing I had hair like that.

I sipped my beer. I knew better than that, that proving oneself to the world can only be on our own terms, not on any based on any fashion or music or philosophy. Take from as many different ideas as possible, ideas that are of interest to the I. Not because someone else thinks highly of them but because they suit our individual selves. The foundations of Western culture is based on the individual and yet so many stick to what others have proposed. Fatten up on other ideas. Don’t feed purely off the junk of Pitchfork magazine…

b)

Then again, these people might not read Pitchfork, based on the music they’re dancing to. The ground floor, the busiest floor, spun British indie rock all night and (gasp!) it all sounded the same. Arctic Monkeys what?

I hate to say such a thing more than I hate Hate itself—and as a writer it’s a lazy way to describe anything—but there’s no other way to put it. Clichés have their purpose. "All the music sounded more or less the same." College kids in cardigans and scarves bobbed along and guzzled beer. The women did something that I suppose resembled dancing but in a room full of white folks that never works out. Besides, the music wasn’t exactly danceable…

I’m not ragging on indie rock—whatever that means—or the merit of British music as a whole. This island has provided the templates for great music of all varieties. Radiohead are the King Biscuit in my books, never mind the Beatles or Bowie or British Sea Power.

But right now, there’s very little making its way across the Atlantic that can appeal to the North American taste. There’s desperation for change and a call for progress happening on that side—politically, socially, spiritually and, as a result, artistically. Musically. Leading ‘indie’ acts like Arcade Fire and Animal Collective sound nothing like their peers. There is a template for indie music, of course! whether it's North American, British or whatever, but there’s something progressive happening over there that I now realize to be unique to North America.

Most of what’s passing as indie in the UK is, on the surface at least, quirky riffage, youthful howling and college anthems. Entrails of the zeitgeist. Indie for indie’s sake. There’s a reason the Rascals are popular only in Britain.

This is more or less what I was thinking about watching drunks stumble and sway along the dance floor, sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. Some kid, Dominic Monaghan identical twin brother? kept bouncing along, snarling, shouting along to every word of every song. He was living it. What I r thought then couldn’t have made a difference—nor should have it. My opinions are only mine. Those words and those sounds, that night, were his youth and he was but one in a crowd loving and taking it all. None of my bitching about the scene or anti-social behaviour could ever change that.

I sucked at the bottle and danced to the best I could. A multi-coloured strobe light washed over the crowd, over my face and in my eyes so I ducked out, raised my hand in the air. Another song, “Hey Boys, Hey Girls”…as the lights danced on my hand, on my wrist, washed up my arm. And the beat, it pulsed and I danced and I think I lost my key that night but I didn’t care. I was living youth too that night. I was living England, tragic music and cardigans be damned.

Why so dense?

2008-02-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

I can't understand Martin Buber. Not in my room, not in the library, not at Cafe Nero with these two nitwit, horse-faced wenches giggling every 25 seconds. Buber's writing doesn't appeal to my 21st century hunger for bullet paragraphs packed with information. I need it all laid out, fast and clear language. Things may have been different in the mid-20th century but, phooey! excuses are excuses. Why would anyone write in such an opaque language? Isn't the idea to appeal to the most people possible? The widest possible audience?

This has little to do with UK entertainment, I know, I know, except that a great many British writer have bewildered the dim with their long-winded prose. Say what you will about "Heart of Darkness," Conrad never cared about the masses. He had his audience, the snob. Intelligent writers should at least try to appeal to the idiot. They need the most help after all...

Missionary!

2008-02-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

I have a mission, it seems, to write about entertainment. UK entertainment, to be exact. This is not my preference but my grades depend on it.

I know very little about this subject, beyond the rise of New Rave, the (supposed) superiority of the British version of 'The Office' and Sophie Howard's breasts.

SO! the blog will be more of a discussion and critique of British media as seen by a crusty young North American-cum-visitor as it relates to a crusty young North American-cum-visitor, and thus North America as a whole.

(I know this because God came to me some weeks ago in the form of a burning bush. I thought this strange because it was raining. I was not stoned. He told me my opinions are that of the whole of North America. I told him he must be stoned. He turned me to dust. I apologized. He returned me to human form and said, 'Be gone, young man!' And I was.)

The blog will be used not just to dissect UK media but UK culture as a whole, because media is nothing more than a reflection of a culture's desires, intelligence and history. As I said, I know very little of any of this. So this should be fun...

MY FIRST NOTE:

I can't escape Britney's twat. Slogging through UK entertainment blogs like the Guardian, Yahoo and Mr. Entertainment, I've noticed that over half (!) of all entertainment news in this country is brought from across the Atlantic. Britney needs a mental exam. Lohan's still on drugs. Paris...something, something. Hollywood's PR community is so muscular the whole WORLD can feel it flex.

I'm not sure why this suprises me right now. I've been over on this side before. I've walked through Piccadilly Circus and seen the Hollywood movie banners plastered across buildings and billboards with screaming lights. I've been picked through a Hello! magazine on more than one occaison to find all the pages filled with the same made-up faces I see day in and day out on my mother's coffee-table copies of People Magazine...save for the photo spread of the Beckhams...who now live in America.

I think it's sad, not for England's dwiddling celebrity power--or even the world's lack thereof. I'm sad because I desperately wanted to leave all this garbage back at home, across the pond. But no. There's Britney, in full resolution and crazy as ever.