The Face of Fear

Her mouth is wide open, and, her eyes are teary and wild. She looks frantically around, while sitting on the seat of a BMX bike, rolling as she pushes with her legs towards the curb. Several others watch from the arched entryway of a derelict brick building, in the shade of an unhealthy tree. I notice the man to the left of the biker.
He's holding a syringe in his left hand, and it's pointing straight up, entering his arm on the inside of his elbow. The syringe and its placement are burnt into my mind like a childhood nightmare--the irrational fear that something extremely bad is about to happen, and that I'd better damn well wake up, because what's coming next is beyond comprehension, and too horrifying to even consider experiencing.
"That's Vancouver," Nathan says. More accurately, this is Vancouver's East Hastings. Someone later tells me it's an area called Tinseltown, but by my eyes, it's everything but. I'd never seen anything like this before. Perhaps that means I'm sheltered, or naive or what have you. Regardless, irrational fear was my only response. While Nathan pushed his sleeping son through this group of people, and despite his reassurances, I walked well into the centre of the otherwise quiet street, and gave these people as much room as I thought I should have. Me.
They were monsters. Not through any fault of their own, or in any way they could help, but only in that, in what vestiges of the mind of a six-year-old I still carry with me, they were the embodiment of terror and confusion. I wanted distance. They could cause harm. Nothing else was important.
Looking back afterwards, I wondered briefly, what happens to people like that. What happened, too. The face of that strange, 20-something BMX woman is etched into my mind. And the needle. That and awkward, childless, ignorant fear. I don't want to see that again. Or feel it. I somehow don't know what to do with the fear. But now I know where nightmares come from. And more than anything, I want them to go away.

Burrard Inlet.

Stompin' Tom and I took a walk across the Burrard Street Bridge here in lovely Vancouver. While he wailed about the 19 steelmen who died in 1959 during the construction of the long steel bridge that passes over Granville Island to the east of us, the sky opened up and poured on me. Then some guy ran into me because I was walking in the bike lane.
Like all classic authors, I'm starting this story in the middle. The drive from Calgary was uneventful; gas mileage and truck performance were respectively fantastic and pathetic. Hills were slow on the up, and rock on the down, with downhill speeds often exceeding 140 km/h with little or no shimmy. Uphill, well, let's say if I had a dollar for every middle finger I got for slowing down traffic, I could buy you and me both a submarine sandwich. Just one. And I pick the toppings.
Add the fact that I rocked myself into Hangover City the night before I left, and you've got one sweat-tacular headache-fest of a drive.
Another source of discomfort was the fact that the last time I'd made this drive was at the dawn of my first-ever relationship with ... hee hee... a girl. It was weird seeing it all again in the same order and at a similar pace, but without that new-relationship euphoria. It sort of lacked the same pizazz. Mind you, I stopped much less often to make out this time, too. Sorry, ladies. No time for truck-stop romance.
Anyway, Vancouver is a lovely town. It's not stunning or amazing so far; but it's only been a few hours since I woke up, and I really don't know what to look for.
Here in the present, I'm in Vancouver's super-weird Colosseum library, which looks like a Roman ... colosseum. Duh. Inside, it looks like a huge civic undertaking, well-funded and costing billions of dollars per second to run. You know, the type of thing Edmonton would downsize or never build in the first place. Anyway, I'm here searching for Karen, my old roommate from Edmonton's heydays. Nobody is allowed to tell me where she is (she works here) or if she's even working today. They told me to phone her, but if she's working, what good would that do?
So, I'll see what else there is to see in Vancouver, drive back over the continental divide, and see what happens. See.

Happy Retirement!

I went to two retirement parties this week--my 60-year-old uncle's, and my own. For three months' service to Furnitureco, I got three pizzas and a Safeway cake. For 35 years of service in the saw shop of the lumber mill in Hinton, my uncle got a big party at a derelict hall, a piece of a giant metal bandsaw with "no matter what they say, we'll always miss you" written onto it with a welder, and a cake that looked like children's celebrity Bob the Builder, holding a hammer, with a big finger-swipe through his face where my nephew attempted to steal the sugar rock that was his left eye.
His party was a celebration of a lifetime of high-paying hard work, with a big pension, and medical coverage and all that other shit you get for working somewhere since 1971. Mine was an excuse for the staff to order pizza. I mean, they were sad to see me go, because I took on the role of "main heavy lifter" to avoid the monotony of the digital inventory system--basically a lazer typewriter you shoot at barcodes while the machine chirps or squaks at you, depending on whether or not... well, really, it's so boring, I know there's no point explaining it. It's a gun with a screen. It counts. Boring. So I moved furniture. Avoided the guns.
But that made me the best worker in history. In the Alberta economy, just showing up is a great way to impress your boss. Not complaining about how you could make more elsewhere at the drop of a hat also earns love points with an employer so desperate that he has to give a job to everyone he interviews. But knowing what I was supposed to do and doing it independently was pretty good, too.
Whatever. Basically, I put my back into it, worked three or four months, and then unceremoniously retired. No benefits. No bonuses. No perpetual stability. Some street cred in the furniture industry and wicked abs (still fairly covered by fat) are my main benefits.
So now, while my uncle is going to work on his house and travel a little eventually with my aunt, I'm going to work on my trailer, try to get over the gut-wrenching panic I get when I think of my newly-abandoned income, and wonder what I'm going to do when I get back to Halifax this time.
Oh, and I'm also going to take the wickedest roadtrip in history. Forgive my use of the term "wickedest," but after three months moving furniture, not writing, and not having anything to think about, I'm still getting the neurons back up to full functionality.
So, I guess I'm leaving in a few days. Delayed. Disorganized. Watching the bank account hemmorhage as I catch up on deferred maintenance on my truck, trailer, and family relationships here in Edmonton. Then it's off to Calgary to drop the trailer. Then, with a light truck and a fistful of dollars, I'll roll to Vancouver, dork around with Nathan and Co., go back to Calgary, and get the trailer.
After that, it's wagons east, with no timeline or destination. I'll be your way soon, since there's nothing in Saskatchewan to stop for, I hear.
And I might cut through the States, though I think that might be a little much. Scary.