urban soldiers march to the 3 min digital playback
IT IS SNOWING AT UBC and the ground looks like it's covered with white mold. I'm in my work clothes, which make me look like a drone. You know, the ubiquitous uniform of the urban soldier. The high school girl in the plaid skirt at the bus stop was doing leg stretches, to rid herself of the invisible handles only she could see, or the last of her babyfat. That time of night, the neighborhood was as quiet as a giant empty parking lot. Vancouver sits on a tiny, fortunate shelf while the rest of the country lies under permafrost or semi-permafrost. Where winter is the main event, and all the other seasons seem like a breather, a sigh in a long haul. I use the word fortunate in the rooted sense: a place touched by Fortune. Think of a towering marble woman with an aquiline nose, tapping her wand over the swaying glass condos. Someone must've shaken fairy dust over Kits.
I'm sorry I've been in so little contact. It does not mean that I haven't been thinking of my friends very often. I've discovered that I need a great deal of time to incubate. And I have to grip onto Time for myself, with coffee-embedded fingernails. What contrives to suck time away from me: the daily drama of meals, the #7 bus route, the aisles of Mountain Equipment Co-Op, the activities of being twenty something. There is a pleasure in these things, but they are things that I can't help sectioning off, so that while I could write an entry filled with the bands I've seen, the things I've bought, my day distills to those few, rare hours cordoned off for writing, or gazing blankly out windows or by water, while the Helijet buzzes off the dockside. I'm endlessly grateful for everything, both of the small connections and of my solitude. (For instance, having a friend plug my mp3 player with old punk- The Stooges, Throbbing Gristle, Ramones, stuff I'm not intimately familiar with- but absolutely awesome to listen to while passing Big Box stores. Or the youngish drummer who shared his joint outside a jazz cellar.) The only things that could claim parallel attention have been the elections, so that I know who to censure the next 3 years. And the labour union heads, who'll be running in the next elections. I commit to clipping stories out of newspapers I don't believe, to remember what seizes my credibility.
More and more I consider the internet a luxury. I prefer this view to the one that dictates that it is widely accessible. I'm finding it reviving, to be away from computer screens. My sense of time has changed since the past year and a half. My sense of time is always changing. The internet is something else that wants to yank time away from long walks past my favourite building, the British Columbia Sugar Refinery Co..
The first of December. For many, the beginning of the end.
I'm sorry I've been in so little contact. It does not mean that I haven't been thinking of my friends very often. I've discovered that I need a great deal of time to incubate. And I have to grip onto Time for myself, with coffee-embedded fingernails. What contrives to suck time away from me: the daily drama of meals, the #7 bus route, the aisles of Mountain Equipment Co-Op, the activities of being twenty something. There is a pleasure in these things, but they are things that I can't help sectioning off, so that while I could write an entry filled with the bands I've seen, the things I've bought, my day distills to those few, rare hours cordoned off for writing, or gazing blankly out windows or by water, while the Helijet buzzes off the dockside. I'm endlessly grateful for everything, both of the small connections and of my solitude. (For instance, having a friend plug my mp3 player with old punk- The Stooges, Throbbing Gristle, Ramones, stuff I'm not intimately familiar with- but absolutely awesome to listen to while passing Big Box stores. Or the youngish drummer who shared his joint outside a jazz cellar.) The only things that could claim parallel attention have been the elections, so that I know who to censure the next 3 years. And the labour union heads, who'll be running in the next elections. I commit to clipping stories out of newspapers I don't believe, to remember what seizes my credibility.
More and more I consider the internet a luxury. I prefer this view to the one that dictates that it is widely accessible. I'm finding it reviving, to be away from computer screens. My sense of time has changed since the past year and a half. My sense of time is always changing. The internet is something else that wants to yank time away from long walks past my favourite building, the British Columbia Sugar Refinery Co..
The first of December. For many, the beginning of the end.