Week off. Nothing to do so I took the train downtown. Be nice if I could take a train like the Dope City Express to work. Maybe I would feel more modern than I do. The only way there will ever be a train station near the sawmill will be after the sawmill has been closed and fucking condominiums have replaced it like they replace every other sawmill that closes its gates.
Got breakfast at the Wet Spot then I went to the library. Made me feel like a city fucker standing in line with over a hundred other people waiting for the library doors to open. Found a book of Bukowski's shit his family must have found in the bottom of a wastebasket. Buk would be pissed if he knew about the crap they were publishing by him now. A little posthumous work is ok but the Poet has been dead for fucking near twenty years. Enough is enough already.
I did find one line in the book I liked as I flipped through it. "I'd as soon drink with anarchists as anybody else."
Once I was done visiting the library I planned to walk around downtown like I was homeless or something, refamiliarizing myself with the streets in case things get weird at the Occupy Vancouver kick-off on Saturday. Before I got far, however, I bumped into the people, mostly women, protesting the enquiry just then getting underway into how the fucking police did not give a shit about all the women that were being murdered in and around Dope City beginning in the early '80s.
They had blocked off the main intersection in town and were giving speeches, banging drums, that sort of thing. I decided to hang around. The workers of my province's forest industry have more in common with all those women who died than we like to think about: we are all disappearing and nobody gives a shit about us either.
Dave Eby was there. You could see the street people who had attended the demonstration really looked up to him. I had never met him before so I introduced myself and enjoyed a brief conversation with him. My instincts are good as gold and they told me he was a fine individual. Do not get many of those attracted to political parties.
One asshole hurried by and yelled, "Get off the fucking street." Yet another disciple of the grand philosophy of our times: Death Before Inconvenience.
I thought the whole thing was really inspiring and when it broke up I felt like maybe I was a different person or something. The people protesting are pissed off the fucking government will not pay for their street people's associations to have a lawyer to represent them before the enquiry. Only makes sense to me. Here is what else makes sense - the police and the government have something like twenty times more lawyers than the families of the women who died and were ground up on the Picton farm. Shows you who the real and biggest criminals of our world are.
Once I was done walking around town I went to the Templeton cafe to have something to eat before I caught my train home. Place has been there on Granville for just about 80 years. Good food, good service and cozy as the relationship between people having way too much money and people having motherfuck all.
10 comments:
Pretty much my favorite thing to do lately is catch the bus into the big city and see what I can turn up. Mostly nothing lately. The city has been taken over by little techno shits who happily work 90 hours a week so long as they can dress up like pirates and spend three days taking drugs no one has ever heard of at Burning Man. I remember looking up and seeing a burning cop car and thousands of people blocking the Bay Bridge. That was more than 20 years ago. I went to check out Occupy SF last week. It turned out to be about 50 nice young hippies and a whole lot of people driving by honking and waving. The did not have time to stop. We are under their thumb around here.
Our techno shits work the same hours and think they are fucking cool for going surfing up at Long Beach for four days a year.
I didn't notice the takeover of SF because of my fucked up state of mind chasing the spoon and numerous incarcerations. I noticed the change after my release in 06. Before my term cell phones were used for talking on the phone. The first day it seemed like Earth had been bodysnatched. Almost everyone was walking with their eyes fixed on their cell phone screens, mindlessly walking into me and each other. I walked past the new(to me) Apple store on Stockton which glowed like a spaceship. Everyone inside stared at screens with earphones attached to their skulls. I got on a bus to escape. I used to like riding public transportation occasionally striking up converstions with strangers who would be reading an interesting book or looked interesting. Now, it had become next to impossible, I hate to sound like an old timer but i sure do miss the old days.
I'll talk to you on the bus Frank.
I think there are now more posthumous Buk books out there than there were published in his lifetime. Over at bukowski.net the forum gets a bit rowdy about it all, especially the editing of much of that verse by what one contributor identifies as a paper clip salesman.
Signed some forms today to end my 30 years of bus driving in six short weeks. I take the train into town as well. Parking is the issue. Actually downtown is the issue. Picked up Revolution in the Head (about the Beatles) in a New West used book store on the way home. Got to have a hobby when not working....
Looks I have the most read by retired bus drivers blog on the internet. May have became a bus driver myself if I hadn't admitted, "I would kick the fucking shit out of them," when asked in an job interview how I would handle unruly passengers.
Beer, is it true that you're being followed by two, count 'em two, retired bus drivers? There's something fucked up about that.
befastpast, I drove variously for The City of Detroit, Indiana University, several San Francisco charter companies and, for 23 years, The Golden Gate Bridge. I Tried, God knows I tried, to get away from it but I ended up driving off and on from 1973 until 2010. I bought my copy of Notes of a Dirty Old Man in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 1972. That same day I also bought a copy of Creem Magazine. I remember it because there was a pretty interesting letter to the editor from some chick named Patti Smith. My, my don't time fly?
Yes Jon, it is fucked up. Could be worse though: I could be being read by two retired honey truck drivers.
Hey all you Bukowskininistiarians,
Bus drivers, retired, or otherwise...
This one is worth listening to - first verse set the tone.
.
I'm not quite retired yet. Six weeks to go. Of course, mentally I got to the end of the line a long time back. Came across Bukowski when Lester Bangs reviewed Erections, etc., in Creem in the early 1970s. A very long ago, strange, life saving discovery.
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