DOUBLE DOUBLE; or, CONSCIENCE BURN...AND REAL ESTATE BUBBLE?

when the bars closed early sunday morning, there wasn't a single cab to be had anywhere on main street in vancouver. i mean, there were swarms of cabs, they just weren't for the having. flagging was pointless, not to mention the danger of approaching the curb (let alone leaving it) and getting closer to the aggressive flow of traffic. the only vehicles with their top lights lit up were ambulances, and although they weren't as numerous as the occupied cabs they were screaming past regularly in both directions collecting party casualties, some of whom might possibly have staggered themselves too close to an unavailable taxi and been hit as they were trying in vain to hail a ride. zombies.

most everyone was in costume. vancouver, they told me, loves halloween. or, rather, vancouver loves costumes, they told me, and halloween is an easy excuse to indulge. as for us, we had indulged the night before and so were the exception on the streets when we went out. i had never seen so many people on the sidewalks of...anywhere, really, who were in costume simply for the fact of the holiday and a saturday. the entire city all dressed up and, it seemed for the most part, with nowhere in particular to go. so they went places. to the places that were available to them to go. and unfortunately that meant a long lineup of costumes outside of "hot one inch action," which meant that we didn't get the opportunity to trade any limited edition buttons -- or even see which ones had been made for the event this year. true, it's what we'd been looking forward to throughout the long afternoon aftermath of our indulgence the night before (including throughout the overlong only one mop cleanup of the toast collective where the dance party had been), but we hadn't come prepared to wait in rain with the characters of "adventure time."

it's easily possible that the gallery had planned this year's action for halloween saturday in order to make itself a place to get dressed up and go. it's also possible that the event had just gotten big. since i'd last visited, the city had been dressing itself up. maybe dubiously, but indubitably. gastown had definitively annexed the part of the demilitarized zone to its east/southeast and solidified its borders around a moodily gleaming design and lifestyle district. with the bulwark of chinatown pushing back along the vector of the opposite diagonal, the dmz had been squeezed essentially flat, into a cross of sidewalks with the heart of its squirming, dispossessed body at the intersection of main and east hastings, its feet milling up and down both sides of the latter as the street made its way through strathcona. the safe injection site at 139 hastings street east marks the edge of the western front at the bottom of the downtown hill. even the rents at the remaining residence hotels must be skyrocketing (not to mention that their old neon would probably look fantastic against refurbished facades and that they were likely already the subject of speculation). the panhandlers who had made their way through the architects, diner-shoppers and post-hipster tattoo artists all the way up to water street were panhandling for fives. but anymore, it's not so much the social services crowd bleeding back against the redevelopment push as the reverse ingress of the well heeled and costumed onto the sidewalks of the main/hastings cross that illustrates the tide of the conflict. from in between the grocery cart pushers, the junkies and the fawn legged prostitutes in miniskirts: the unmistakable drag of the contemporary young professional.

i had been driven by it a number of times in the past but had never before made it inside of spartacus books, which is located at the bottom of the cross across from the avalon on hastings as it makes its way through strathcona. on this visit, however, i made a point of passing by on foot during decent weekday hours. and on that friday noon i was part of the ingress (indubitably if maybe also dubiously), coming as i was from near the east van cross at clark and great northern way snapping photos (although i never got around to getting a photo of the cross itself). the non-profit, volunteer staffed store has a surprisingly large selection of journals for its size, many of them (of course) canadian and many of them (of course) with an obvious leftward lean. but there are poetry and fiction journals too. that friday, the staff was reorganizing the bookshelves, but i still found a used copy of the psychogeography collection edited by will self for under eleven dollars. inexpensive enough, yes, but too big and too heavy to have to carry around all day and then later have to pack with all the others and carry around for the rest of my trip. so i bought a magnet and a button as souvenirs, the button a bit of a crossword puzzle showing the words "mend," "melee" and "vneck." something for my lapel for the weekend, and good thing, since we wouldn't be waiting in the rain for the one inch action the next night.

afterward i walked through strathcona and onto main street from behind the train station, then up the hill to spend the rest of my afternoon looking for something signature secondhand that would be all the more special for my having not bought it in the states. from past experience i'd considered c'est la vie to be my best bet, but the woman there didn't seem to want anything to do with customers that day. luckily, i'd already found a vintage tote at woo when i got there and didn't feel at all put out by her inattentiveness. anyway, there wasn't a thing in the scaled back men's section that i wanted. plus, i needed to stop...although that didn't stop me from getting something else from the fancy thrift store on cordova when i'd made it back down the hill and into gastown. mercifully, my bandmate confirmed the advisability of the purchase when i met her back at the flower shop. an old piano key belt was definitely something that someone in our group would wear (offstage). we'd just been talking about the development of our new project the previous afternoon as we were making deliveries in yaletown and on granville island. rosehip & wax flower was a serious group about unserious shit. or something in between that and the other way around. unsarcastic songs about the bitterness of first world problems. "it's the sherry again." that was going to be the hit.

 

but sorry. it's the sherry again (or the warm lucky beer chaser). my canadian person costume got an apathetic reception at the toast collective party, but people were drinking enough that at least one of them was willing to overlook my obviously american half-effort to compliment the elegance of my vomiting into the bushes before i headed face forward for my bandmate's couch. still, the general canadian eye was on other mid-fall american high jinks that morning -- or afternoon, in our case, when we finally made it to slickity jim's. the focus article in that saturday's globe and mail was on the election in ohio. "like us or not" was the message i decided to imbue, take and project, but as soon as i was finished with the article i drowned myself in the blurb about the forthcoming book of illustrations by rené gruau, which was set below an almost full page reproduction of an illustration (probably) from the book. dress-up!

we hadn't planned to dress for the occasion when we left for the button event later that evening, but by early the next morning my bandmate and i were changing. at a bus stop in front of the train station, just several blocks from east hastings on main, i was going barefoot. if there weren't any cabs to be had and we were going to have to walk, she wasn't going to have to walk in the heels of those boots. so she went as a clown in my shoes, and i went as a survivor of the zombie/"adventure time"/young professional apocalypse happening on the streets around us, stumbling and laughing through another end of the world. then our third, dressed in a toned down version of the train robber's getup that he'd worn the night before, ran off to steal us the cab with its top light on that was headed into the parking lot of the station across the street. and none too soon. in the short span of the walk to where the robber was holding the car, i knew that i would have had a difficult time making it back to mclean in my costume.

the cab that took me back to the station five hours later had been on duty since just after we'd gone to bed. the underage parties, he told me to my surprise, were the worst. and the driver had another eight hours to go on his shift. i didn't have much time before i needed to catch my bus back to seattle, but i wanted the coffee. so i left the station parking lot and went across the street to the tim hortons on terminal way. give me: coffee. two sugars, two creams. i'd saved just enough of my remaining cash after tipping the cabbie. i should have gotten that book at the radical bookstore, but i really didn't want to carry it. that morning, my backpack was especially heavy, and i had another bag waiting in portland -- plus whatever i added to the load once i got there. so i crammed my great white guilt into my new vintage tote bag and doubled down on my double double. there was room in the tote because i hadn't made it to the cbc shop. and that was fine, i thought, really a very petty worry; that and the customs officer at the border was going to give me trouble as i was.