The wednesday chronicle.
I am no fan of blogs. I see no value in reading the self important ramblings of some concieted windbag(like me) who thinks everything that happens to them(again, me) is so fucking interesting and wrongly believes that their writing style so mindbendingly captivating(ahem, me) that their diary somehow is worthy of reading. Yeah yeah, you did this, uh huh, you're so funny, oh really ... whatever.
But, I have something I need to share. Last wednesday was a real tough day for me. We all have tough days, and those of us without websites just live through them and carry on with our lives. But one day we will all have websites and I hope I am dead before that happens.
But before I can explain the tough day here is a little background.
I rent the main floor of a house all by myself. It's a nice place, it's spacious, bright, the rent is breaking my back but I like it too much to move somewhere reasonable. There is a suite in the basement. For a while a cokehead backhoe operator lived there, but he had trouble making rent and got evicted. This was going to be something of foreshadowing. The next tenants were an engaged couple finishing college, both environmentalists, who were very easy going and lead a pretty tame life from what I could gather. They seemed to spend their evenings and weekends hanging out only with this one other couple. I never saw the downstairs couple with anyone else except the other couple. They made up a social circle that had been factorially reduced to a square. A bonded pair bonding pairs. Presumably this all would find its ending 10 years down the road with wife swapping and some secret bad habits eased into with benzodiazapenes and painkillers.
Anyway they graduated, married and moved out. On to the next stage in the perfectly charted course from starting college to saving up so your offspring can go to college. Good for them. I sure do miss them. The landlords don't like that place to sit empty and through the grapevine had found new tenants to take their place very quickly. The new tenants were also a young couple, but other than that were about as similar to the old ones as Stone Temple Pilots are similar in quality to Nirvana.
I met the girl first, one day as I was walking to the garage she was in the backyard turning over the dirt in the garden. The garden hadn't got much use from me. Unless it stings or combusts I am pretty much indifferent to things in the backyard. Anyway, we introduced ourselves and she asked if I would like to use part of the garden, I said no thanks, then said that maybe I would like to grow potatoes. I don't know why I said that because I wouldn't. She told me her boyfriend was moving in the next day, he is a roofer, and she is looking for a job.
She seemed a little nervous and I got bored pretty fast so I wrapped things up and went on with my very important business of going to get a burrito.
The next time I spoke to her was when we ran into each other in the laundry room, which is in a shared area in the basement. During the conversation she really impressed me with what a speed tweeker she clearly was. She spoke at a mile a minute jumping from subject to subject with no indentifiable completion of a single thought. The conversation was less enjoyable to listen to than The Rolling Stones since about 1980 or any Bluegrass recording since the dawn of history.
Then I met the roofer boyfriend. I could tell in the first second I looked at his eyes that things were a little whirly. That was when I found out that presently their family vehicle was a single bmx which they both shared. I tried to keep the conversation short which wasn't easy, but I managed it by being rude.
The next time I saw him he was in the front yard with a rake. The yard is nicely landscaped, under the trees the owners had put cedar chip beds. For some reason he was raking them. I watched him repeatedly pull away the chips from the weed barrier beneath and then tear up the weed barrier with the rake, it was fucking hilarious. I think he thought he was doing something useful or helpful, but in reality he was just brimming with energy for an outside other reason which I had my suspicions about. Anyway he started talking and quickly divulged all kinds of bizarre things. He used to only listen to country music, then he really liked Tool. But his true musical soulmate was the Wu-Tang clan. He had over 60 cd's from the wu-tang clan and their individual projects. I tried not to laugh.
"The Rza is a genius man, the Razor. Those guys were really serious about it too."
"Oh. Really."
"Yeah and the Gza is a genius man, that's his name, the genius."
"Yeah right, the Gza."
"The Rza is ol dirty bastards cousin. O.D.B. just overdosed. I had a friend who overdosed."
"Uh. That's too bad."
"Inspecta Deck is comin to town, I already got my ticket, he's a genius man."
So I assumed they were speed users, but more than likely dabbled in the whole drug menu since that is the way it usually works. My next conversation with him he really opened up, which happened without my asking, and he filled me in on his life story. He owed 5 grand in payments on a car he had totalled, his second or third totalled car the others he totalled driving drunk. He grew up in B.C., his best friend died driving drunk, some other people died driving drunk. He used to have a pretty serious meth problem when he lived in a suburb of Edmonton called Sherwood Park, but then he met his girlfriend and they got away from all that. By the way, me and him were having this conversation in the beginning of June. I asked him when he met his girlfriend, he said the end of April.
So they had met and moved in together to get away from the drugs ... a month ago. I immediately remembered that in some rare cases drug problems can take over a month to resolve. I could barely wait for the inevitable comedy to ensue.
It was a hot day when we were having this conversation in the backyard where, embarrassingly enough I was catching some rays and reading a book, which I know is gay but fuck you. So anyway, he stood talking to me and then showed me his tattoos, he had 3, each as wicked as the rest. They were all the same. They consisted of chinese characters written next to drawings of the animal the chinese character represented. I find this pretty funny for a lot of reasons, for instance the fact that those characters have become something of a fad in tattoo art around the same level of originality as the lower back tattoo on sluts. But the reason its so funny is the fact that not one of the halfwits getting a chinese character tattooed on themselves could give one good reason why it is appropriate for the symbol to be chinese. They have absolutely no connection with chinese culture outside of the tattoo and they couldn't be less like our industrious, diligent, and mathematically adroit yellow cousins from the east. I have no idea what makes white people think it is cool to swipe another cultures icons, totally failing to grasp the depth and importance of those things to their creators. I have to wonder if the chinese appreciate the indignity of having the symbols of their civilization that have existed for thousands of years being trivialized by dumb white people.
So that's my anti-chinese tattoo speech. Think about it.
Now then, I recognize that the things I have just written about the people in my basement are somewhat mean. I want to make it clear that I think they are probably decent people who just have a problem. I think sooner or later they will probably find a way to get a handle on life, or they won't, either way it is out of my hands.
It is pretty hypocritical of me to feel superior and I actually don't. Especially since as far as using chemicals as a crutch goes, I am known to drink too much and I have relied on the alcoho-booze too heavily in the past and present. And not to mention there was quite a long time in my life when I was broke and lived pretty sketchily too.
But anyway, that is the background you need to understand the story of the tough wednesday that I had. Which as it happens is going to be part 2 of the wednesday chronicles. So stay tuned for part 2, or the actual story of that much built up wednesday I keep referring to.