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Post by Dave Besseling on Jul 9, 2007 16:39:19 GMT -5
GMT – 7 North America Canada British Columbia 49 13 00 N 123 06 00 W . VANCOUVER . Main Street is the cracked side of the hand that taps the divide, the broken yellow line (Strollers stroll and swings swing. Sandboxes and see-saw plastic smiling birds - frozen spit on their wings.) . between the Van City bank and the station. The Ivanhoe pub: where you sit and wait for the junkies to come in to sell you stuff they haven’t quite procured yet. As it goes: a verbal request will send them out for their straight to pub-table delivery service. Amuse yourself by watching the guy next to you doing broken yellow rails of blow. Cologne? A Snowboard? Two kilos of mince? One could do their shopping here, tick off their entire Christmas list, had they enough time, a patient disposition and no conscience. Now: There are two beer taps in the Ivanhoe with the male ends of screw-on mechanisms exposed; you know, where the brands would spin their polished pulleys into place, and two taped-on pieces of notebook paper proclaiming that the two democratic and non-racially aligned choices of grog today are “light” and “dark”. Mais c’est tout, nothing more. Have we happened upon a half-imagined place of myth and boozish lore where the draught really is the dregs of leftover Molson and Labatt bottles from the night before from the nicer pub up the way, siphoned into empty and rusty kegs? I order a pint of the “dark”. Afterwards I saunter past aforementioned park: A man at the bottom of the slide, cruci-posited upside down; head cocked back and hung low moaning to his methadone Calvary. . Here’s a pile of garbage… There’s a grimacing scabrous countenance on a woman nestled in between orange peels, McDonald’s bags and butter smeared bread crusts from former glutinous breakfasts. I think she needs help. From underneath her runs a broken yellow stream. Charming. She’s shat and pissed herself. There’s her boyfriend now, to come and save the day. He takes her away from the scene – not hand in hand, even hand under head but by another perky spike in a tired looking vein. . Those glorious Rockies are in the distance, look at them instead. They look well enough, self-respecting - and they don’t feel any pain. .
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