4 April 2016

Victoria!



Sonja and I have had to make our own good luck in this world. Working people have to work at that more than just about anything. The world, effortlessly it would seem, provides plenty of bad luck which must be overcome for one to have any chance of gaining the measure of happiness and freedom necessary to a life worth living.

Principally our efforts to make a life for ourselves in the stacked card game of life have permitted us to travel. No one would think us jet setters or anything, mind. We consider it exceptional good luck to travel by airplane once a year for a cheap holiday in someone else's misery. More often we get to travel our own massive province. We are not stuck, as too many are, in a neighbourhood that has become an inescapable prison.

On Friday Sonja said, "Let's go to Victoria." Had not been there for far too long. I agreed it was a splendid idea.

We woke early Saturday morning and drove to the ferry terminal where we were greeted by a highly personable gatekeeper who seemed happy for us to have chosen the short trip by sea to Victoria for the first time in quite a while. The ferry workers are counting on more of us using the valuable service they provide despite the unfavourable pricing model our present government insists on maintaining in the face of low ticket sales.

"Welcome back!" she chimed. "There's no place like Victoria. Are you spending the night?"

"Not this time," Sonja told her from the passenger seat. "We're hoping if we only spend the day no one from the Victoria police department will recognize us from the last time we spent a couple nights there."

The gatekeeper laughed before getting in the last word. "Fuck the police. Next time spend the night. Night time is the best time in the Victoria."

We spent most the sailing filling up at the buffet then drinking coffee. We have never had a bad time on Vancouver Island or the nearby Gulf Islands. Somehow, once we leave the motherfucking rat race of Dope City, we are set free.

We have never gone to Victoria with a plan but we often spend some time in all our favourite places: hanging out with the dopers enjoying the view of the harbour; visiting Queen Victoria (this time attracting the attention of a security guard with decent instincts who clearly did not want me or my back pack getting too close to my province's Legislature); finding seats in the many pubs filled with Saturday's shitfaced and about to be shitfaced.

I found myself some records in Fan Tan alley and on Fort Street. Sonja found herself some summer clothes. While I waited on Fort Street's sidewalk outside a funky women's boutique a Liberal MLA by the name of Susanne Anton happened by accompanied by a male flunky. I very nearly heaved.

I have never been near Anton and so have never had the chance to allow my instincts to feel her out. It was pretty fucking nauseating.

Her flunky, yet another Mr. Suit, had much the same effect on me. A pair of nauseating Capitalist whores. Neither one of them had yet met an elitist dick they did not immediately suck dusty.

Their fucking type I had seen on previous trips to Victoria. I never let them grind me down.

With time to kill before catching our ferry home we went for a drive through and surrounding Oak Bay. Where Victoria's old and new money lives. To a sawmill worker's eyes there is something tremendously disproportionate about seeing what too much money can buy a man. It is no wonder sawmill owners keep their workers away from their homes. To do so would provide too clear a window on the thievery they like to think of as free enterprise.

Further along the way, near the border between Saanich and Sidney-By-the-Sea, we happened upon Oak Bay's nearby polar opposite: people living in decaying trailers hemmed in by chain link, their worldly possessions protected by direct action and pitbull growls instead of one of today's ubiquitous advanced security systems.  

Ferry ride home was uneventful. We bought a ticket to the buffet and each ate a pie washed down by numerous cups of coffee. Nice way to close out a day.

Noticed a car driving off the ferry without his headlights on, got by him and forgot about him until he caught up to us many miles down the road. Asshole still did not have his headlights on.

"Asshole must be pretty fucking wasted to not notice his lights are not on for this long," I said to Sonja as he passed me and I double-flashed my high beams at him. So wasted he dragged his car along a high cement median for a couple hundred feet when I startled him with the lights. Half a mile down the rode he finally clued in and turned them on.

Here is some news most of you already know - when it is night time and you are wasted drive with all your lights on.

I was.

No comments: