My uncle Reg - bought a ticket to the Cayman Islands, pensively traced infinity signs in a plate of mofongo
Ray Winstone - starred in "44 Inch Chest"
My old KFC boss - crossed my name off a list of eight, disassembled, cleaned and reassembled his Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle, picked up the phone again
Mike Reno, lead singer of Loverboy - grinned triumphantly at my uncle Reg, continued massaging his feet
Jerry Lee Lewis - married his cousin
Frank Fleer, inventor of bubble gum - invented bubble gum
Walter Diemer, Fleer accountant who perfected Dubble Bubble and forever associated bubble gum with the colour pink - drummed with Shellac at the ATP Festival in a Todd Trainer wig
Some asshole at the ATP Festival, during the Shellac show - tossed, with expert precision, a lemon wedge down the crack of my ass, which he was able to do because my ill-fitting pants displayed my "findibia" (the beginning of the crack of one's ass (just invented! patent pending!)) to the assembled rockers seated behind me, including said asshole, who for some insane reason had my phone number (no he didn't, but what the hell he may as well have cause dude tossed that wedge from fifteen feet)...!
A plate of mofongo - looked Lotan Baba up on Wikipedia, sang the chorus to "The Kid is Hot Tonight"
Bob Weston, bass guitarist for Shellac and inventor of the Ford F150 - shot my uncle Reg in the heart
Bell mobility - left a message for me to call their customer service line, probably because I've renewed my credit card and they haven't been gettin' their due for a few months
The other day on CBC radio I heard a whole lot of people on a call-in show bitching about how many cyclists flout the rules of the road. It was, I believe, a response to this video:
...or perhaps not this video exactly, but something like it that I was unable to find.
Fair point: cyclists roll through stop signs.
But let's take a moment to observe some unmistakable truths. In not one of these instances does a cyclist put themselves or anyone else in harm's way. In not one of these instances does a cyclist interrupt or inhibit in any way the natural flow of traffic as it would have occurred without them being on the road at all. No pedestrians had to break their stride or break into a run to cross the street, and no vehicle had to stop where they wouldn't otherwise have stopped.
There was one example where a cyclist tailed a car through the intersection, which maybe caused the vehicle to his right to have to wait 0.5 seconds longer before they could proceed. Which is less time than they would have waited had the cyclist pulled to a complete stop and started up again.
I have often had the occasion to drive through the UBC grounds, and I can tell you that it is generally not a vehicle-friendly place. Not only cyclists but pedestrians often behave as though the entire campus was an open promenade - people cross any street anywhere, crosswalk or not, often in the safety of great numbers. So if you want to park a camera anywhere in the city with the intention of observing the progress of vehicles being hampered, the UBC campus is a great place to do it.
I mention again, though, that this is not what happens in the video. Take one: cyclist rolls through the stop sign, never once delaying even for a second anyone's natural progression through the intersection. Take two: repeat.
The dirty, ugly truth is that cyclists do it because they know they can get away with it.
Not just that they will probably not get a ticket, but that they are almost always able to judge all the variables accurately as they approach the intersection. They can hear as well as see, so they have an advantage over someone in a car. There is no carriage to create blind spots in the cyclist's field of vision. The speed and mobility of a bicycle are also helpful in reducing those parts of a cyclist's field of perception that may be blinded by bushes, parked cars, construction zones. You can fill in those blanks more effectively if you're able to move around a little faster than a pedestrian can.
Finally, cyclists know that if they need to they can take that narrow, economical little implement they're riding on and neatly thread whatever needle they choose.
If a cyclist is paying attention, and if the intersection has few obstructions or blocked sight lines, there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to roll through a stop sign with zero risk to anyone. And cyclists pretty much universally pay attention. They're actively engaged with their immediate environment - it would be hard not to.
I pledge no allegiance to urban bikers who wear MP3 players. They are idiots. If there is going to be a ticket given for something...
Well, I'm not going to say that the law shouldn't apply to cyclists. If the police want to mount an aggressive enforcement campaign, I can offer no criticism. Save that they could better use their time and resources doing almost anything else - if what they want is harm reduction.
Yesterday as I was biking up Yukon on my way home from work, a driver paused at an intersection where I had right of way. She checked both ways, made what I believed was eye contact with me, and then proceeded to pull out anyway and nearly boned me head on. I had to swerve across the (thankfully empty) street.
I bike to work every day. Something like this happens about once a week. I feel like the odds are fair that one of these times I won't be able to react quickly enough.
The truth of it is that there are armies of car, truck and bus drivers who behave as though they have no earthly idea that there is traffic on the road which looks like pedestrian but behaves like vehicle. Every once in a while one of them does some real damage. Most of the time it's just enough to call a fear of God to the cyclist's mind. And the real fuck of it: sometimes it seems like the driver is doing it on purpose.
Exhibit Ugh: doesn't this guy, who is running for mayor of Canada's somethingest city, seem to take a teensy bit of pleasure in the subject at hand?
I caution you: align yourself carefully. Seat yourself in the anthropologist's chair: is there anything in the video of that UBC intersection that is evidence of something other than humanity's industriousness, acuity and overall good judgment?
Now turn that objective eye on yourself: are you the kind of person who believes that bikes belong on the road, or aren't you?
A: My mother plays the piano, though she will only play religious music - not because she's declared some kind of fatwa against secular music, but because it was all she ever learned to play growing up. The cds she has accumulated - the half of them that weren't gifts from me, tentative and mostly wrong-headed guesses at things that might spark new interest in life in a person of her age and exceedingly withdrawn temperament - are a scattershot collection of albums made by people she knows (her mandolin teacher from ten years ago, her church's organist, her son) plus whatever completely random flotsam managed to wash up on the remote shores of her appreciation of modern popular culture.
She bought the Bodyguard soundtrack, for instance - five years after everyone else did. When you think about it, almost all of the music in her life has been visited upon her as a kind of assault.
B: By the time I was old enough to be interested in music, my father had lost the hearing in his right ear. Having only one working ear makes music a distraction, something that prevents you from hearing the things you need to hear. What I saw as a fuel was a pollutant to him. Neither one of us could see things from the other's perspective.
C: I have inherited a fair number of vehicles from my parents, including the one on which I currently rely to get me around every once in awhile. Without exception they have all come into my possession with a blown driver's side speaker.
Look, most of the time I walk around this earth with a chip on my shoulder, a two-by-four in my eye, and a load in my pants. How I ever got this far from the Cherry Blossom Clinic is a mystery.
But today I have to crow. My morning class hit its last Friday of the term, which means students did presentations. And every time up till now that this has happened, it's been a quiet, shuffling, lawn-boning disaster. They get up one after another, do what they can (oh, the empathy), and it's all over in about an hour.
But today's students ran over time and for the most part they were amazing. I mean for upper beginners to make twenty-minute speeches is just nothing short of it. And they were funny as heck; they really killed it.
One student got nerves so bad he just ambled back to his seat and sat down before he'd said a word. He tried again after the break and it was the most hilarious thing. He's a Saudi student, and he's got fifteen bedrooms and twenty-one bathrooms in his villa back in the K.S.A. He borrowed another student's laptop, did some bullshit google image search, and there it was: a picture of his enormous fucking house. All the Saudis in class were laughing so hard I was scared someone was going to fall out the window, and the Asian students had this look on their faces like they'd just found out their parents are robots.
I really have no idea: I could be the archetypal male Westerner in the minds of the next generation of plutocrat overlords that run all our shit for us. I don't really know just how well off these students really are, and it's hard to imagine them in humongous ornate tents in the desert with camel milk and silver tea and coffee decanters and kaftans and a bearded, shoepolished Anthony Quinn. But that's what so many of my students come from. One day one of their fathers may have me destroyed.
A Taiwanese student gave a lovely presentation, unaided by notes of any kind yet grammatically precise, about Taiwanese food and customs. He showed a picture of pettitoes (pig's feet, used as food), explained what it was, and then I watched as it sank in with all the Saudi students that this gentle young man would wind up in hell for the things he ate.
All in good fun.
Afterwards was the graduation barbecue: for this one, I was the "games" guy. So I played volleyball with a group of soccer-loving multinationals who could probably tie someone else's shoes with their feet, but mostly couldn't coordinate their hands well enough to bump, set or spike in a way that didn't look absolutely foolish. My small-town high school V-ball skills took center stage. I was the hero.
And then I borrowed another teacher's guitar and futzed around a bit, and I was the hero again. I'M LIKE THAT. Today my students were awesome, and then I was even more awesome. Let tomorrow's pianos fall where they may.
Like this one: A is not B. B is the opposite of C. Therefore A is C.
Let's let Alpine = A. B is Blaupunkt. Blaupunkt is obvs superior to Alpine in every way. Alpine is for chumps. Let's let C = Clarion. Ha ha ha ha ha. Are you telling me that Clarion and Blaupunkt have aught to do with each other? They have naught! To do with each other! They are very naught-y. Now. Does this mean that Alpine = Clarion?
FUCK NO I hear you say. Well I should think not. When we say that there are only two kinds of 80's car stereos (Blaupunkt and everything else), what we are really saying is that what we call "everything else" is a graduated collection of car stereos that are inferior in different ways, and to different degrees, to Blaupunkt.
I will now phoneticize the synth line in Herbie Hancock's "Rockit". Bwaat bwaat battabatta bwaat bwaat battabatta BE BOOP! BE BOOP! DAH DOOP DOOP DOOOOH! BOO DAH DOOP BEE DOOP DOOTDOOTIT.
QED, muthaflippers. Quietly Eat a Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick.
I am not an expert cyclist. Well, yes, my thighs are pretty powerful, and thank you. But I really don't know what I'm doing on a bike. Too tentative by half. And I'm not adept at changing gears. If you asked me what gear I usually ride in, I would probably want to hit myself several times from shame of not knowing. And I would want to say "shame" when I did it.
I only recently learned that my bike is in fact dark green, and not black. And I still so don't care. With some people, if you haven't forged the bike yourself, smelted the spokes, vulcanized the tires (right?), repurposed some antique elkhorn or other as a handlebar, you're not serious enough. I got my bike repaired last month, and learned that my bike has cassettes. I'm sure some velophile (a velophile is someone who gets sexual excitement from eating bicycles) has taken the cassettes out of their bike and put in 7-inch vinyl. Reel-to-reels. 8-tracks? Okay, it isn't funny with any of them. But I'M TRYING.
Now I have to learn how to do this. I'm forgoing the bus pass this month, saving money. Isn't that fucking sad, when someone can't afford to get a bus pass? I think that's fucking sad. Come on, Vancouver. Sorry for the swearing.
I'm saving money by biking to work this month. Did you know that June is bike month? Me neither. Well, it's bike month for me, because I - never mind, I've already whined about it too much. At any rate, it's about time we all biked everywhere we ever went all of the time, don't you think? Two wheels Dennis Hopper. Four wheels Suzanne Somers. RIP, Suzanne. GET ON YOUR BIKES AND RIDE! Unless you have one of these, in which case walking is probably the thing for you.
I used to have this blog, and it was called The Shantytown Orgasms - yes, I know it's an absolutely amazing name, and I always wanted to be in a band called The Shantytown Orgasms but could never make it happen, mostly because as a musician I'm kind of a ball-hog who can never be bothered to learn other people's songs and never wrote enough good ones of my own to make anyone famous. Wow, there's a lot of information in that sentence, boy - why don't you just slip it into reverse, turn around and look behind you, ease up on the clutch and back slowly out of the garage. There you go. Now turn the car off, here's a hanky to wipe your brow and remember you can't kill anyone with a run-on sentence.
The awful job I had back then, menial and bizarre, put my imagination to work. I was summering in the hypothalamus. I didn't make a serious decision about anything for several years.
I languished in bed on days off, thinking: fucking what now? I got up and did whatever. Time passing was a stunt, and when I went back to work I usually did so with some relief.
When I quit the job, I quit the blog. I didn't mean it to be so severely concurrent but I guess I felt like I was really moving on. I started another one: a travel blog, shared with Erika. We kept it going till we returned from Japan world-drenched and insufferable.
Then I had my lost year. Those recent adventures are now like pillowcases all torn open in a summer breeze, and I'm back to worrying about things I haven't legitimately worried about since I was writing The Shantytown Orgasms - money and lack, drudgery in abundance, mortality bahbahbahbah, these haggard old mares are back wanting buckets of oats.
Ray Winstone - starred in "44 Inch Chest"
