things move around

I make pilgrimmage to a well known exploitative globalised capitalist fast food outlet for lunch, and on the way back to my office am distracted from the agonies of my inner gut by a faint cheer and a solitary whistle. Anti-Bush rally. Divert to take a look. Couple of hundred commies and eco-warriors, with the odd granny sprinkled in for the attendant TV cameras, bearing witless placards and clad mainly in Gore-Tex ™ or seemingly home-made knitwear. One placard reads, and I swear I’m not kidding, “Bush doesn’t care about the environment.” Some bloke on a podium ranting about war crimes and how great the Palestinians are. I get a free coffee. Anyway, I’m infiltrating the mob, trying to get a gander at the politburo in back of the podium, dodging vendors of anarchist pamphlets (just two bucks!) when everyone starts going nuts, shaking their flagstaffs and howling and screaming and so on, their faces purpling into paroxysms of loony rage. Imagine the Barbarian hordes at the start of the movie Gladiator, but with cell-phones instead of bastard swords, and you won’t be far wrong. I’m carrying none too subtly a copy of the right of centre National Post under my arm, so I mumble my excuses and leave the irate sloganeers to their bored-looking police escort and their defiant plod round the chilly Downtown streets. Not sure what they’re hoping to achieve with all this ruckus - can hardly see Bush being born again again, converting to the far left cause and replacing Condee with CP - but I guess it warms the cockles on a late November day. Lumber and beef, now those are two things I could get gnarly about, but it seems this crowd are less excited by free trade than by free coffee, free Willy and freeee-ky!

If Haile Selassie had been Scottish, would he have been Haile Seladdie?

This morning I wrapped my arms around me like a lycra bodysuit and walked to work. Across Burrard Inlet, a couple of miles off, four to five-thousand foot mountains are snowed-over almost down to their toes. Thick forest gives the whole screed a speckled look, a heavy seasonal green flecked, and occasionally gashed by a ski-run, white.

- Pains

- What’re you doing for lunch?
- Oh, I have something.
- Whaddaya have?
- You know, just a salad.
- What kinda salad?
- It’s got some meat, and cheese, and stuff like that.
- What sorta meat?
- Alligator.
- Oh.

I’ve been on Planet Bingo 20 years
and I recall the early pioneers
who bet the house,
the pet, the spouse,
and lost of course, and shed no tears,
and waltzed the night away to Johann Strauss
beneath the sidereal chandeliers.

On Planet Bingo everybody wears
elaborate and ostentatious flares
and on the bus
we all discuss
the lifestyles of the millionaires
and other things that don’t apply to us
like wealthy dowagers in need of heirs.

To recollect those gilded escapades,
those penny opera pageants and parades,
is some succour,
you can be sure,
as Planet Bingo slowly fades,
like that exotic holiday brochure
and that old gear - the velveteens and suedes.

Came to a coast of channels and inlets,
camped there two nights in a cove, close by
a bay in which mountainside vapours collected,
filtered by fir trees.
                           An isle
resembling the back of whale was visible
the first afternoon, when the sun topped the crags
behind us, and skerried the shadows and mist.

[…]

The map unrolling into the West, the New
undoing the architecture of the Old, the gust
of the Motherland on our backs and on our lips.

“In one week recently we had 3 amazing deaths over here - first John Peel, the demolition expert & industrial history pundit, then Fred Dibnah, the Middle Eastern revolutionary always a thorn in Israel’s side, & as if that wasn’t enough, Yasser Arafat the DJ who I used to listen to when I was a young teacher, has popped his clogs too.”

One common ancestral language? You’re having a laugh!

I won’t put up with the ravings of Greenbergites and Proto-Worldists.