Waterline

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top. - Hunter Thompson

Long weekend Sundays are a great day to travel around my City of Dope. The streets and the sidewalks are a little less crowded when half the city is out in the woods crashing into one another on their Chinese mountain bikes. My small Steepleton Hockey family took advantage of the situation and, carefully skirting the Pacific National Exhibition, spent the afternoon on the Drive and Main Street.

Despite the relative lack of traffic there sure were a lot of people honking and fingering one another over various minor driving mistakes. Everyone on the road is a fucking maniac or a fucking idiot. The sudden death of summer, symbolised by Labour Day, gets a lot of folks stressed as an old bridge in an earthquake.

Except for the occasional snort from my flask I do not drink on the Drive. They do not sell booze at all the hippy establishments we pick up our groceries in. Come to think of it, I did not even smell any pot being smoked as we wandered from one shop to another. All the pot smokers were either in the mountains smoking their motherfucking brains out or they were too busy growing the shit to smoke it.

My record shop had a vinyl re-issue of the Drive-By Truckers' "Southern Rock Opera" in their wall display. That will be spinning on my turntable as I drink my Anarchist coffee Labour Day morning and grin about not having to join the rest of the world as it plunges into the Rat Stampede on Tuesday morning.

Picked up an album's worth of old Mott the Hoople demos (I used to listen to their brilliant records and bang my head against the wall when I was a teenager) and a cd by Cedell Davis being played when I walked in the record shop door. Cedell plays my kind of blues - dirty as a sawmill shitter floor the day after pay day.

The Hammer drooled on everyone who got close to her and ate everything resembling food she could find on the filthy sidewalks. Like usual it was a motorhead chick in the midst of losing all her teeth to the crystal who fawned over the Hammer the hardest. Dogs bring out the best in the most fucked up of us.

Over on Main it was Sonja who noticed that, "People sure aren't as healthy looking on this street as people back on the Drive." She was right. Everybody was as pasty and ill looking as the people you see on an English football terrace in February.

On Main I picked up my second copy of Bukowski's "Women." I never should have lent out my first copy. On a wall in the store a framed, signed copy of a Peter Trower poem hung for sale. It was about sawmills being mother-like. He got the mother part right anyway. Sonja thought it a bit pricy. I am going to have to go back next week and buy it after I pull my picket duty.