things move around

I had dinner at the Gypsy - the only good place to eat (or drink) in Calgary, where the goulash spackles your insides like a constellation made of beef and paprika - reading my book, listening to an anaemic blend of Piaf-a-likes and eurojazz, and then, reluctantly, I left.

As I approached the revolving door of the hotel, the doorman, jumping to’t, set the revolving door aspin for me and called me “sir”. Why? It’s clear that I can spin my own doors, and I am not a knight.

I’ve never liked being called “sir”. I hate the obsequiousness of commerce - the way every lowlife who walks through the doors is automatically a higher lifeform, and more to the point, the implication that I, when buying a drink or availing myself of a minuscule but free tube of toothpaste from the front desk, desire that limp honorification, that I will think better of someone because of it.

Now I’m listening to The Smiths. Never been an apostle of the Smiths or Morrissey, but this has always been one of my favourite lyrics:

If a double-decker bus
crashes into us:
to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die;
and if a ten-ton truck
kills the both of us:
to die by your side, well the pleasure and the privilege is mine.