people i see: weird cymbal lady

Victoria BC, dark January 2023 AD evening. I’m going to look at a cymbal that is for sale on facebook marketplace. The seller has been nice to deal with over messenger but when she gives me her address, I recognize it as being a low income housing development I have bought tacky old stuff from before. I arrive and yup it’s the same complex. I find the seller’s unit, ring the doorbell, and a 60-ish year old woman opens the door a crack. Eventually lets me in and I say hi to her very friendly dog. Then she politely tells me to get the fuck inside and close the door before the cat escapes, and then proceeds to spin some yarn about where this rescue cat came from. She and her place actually aren’t too sad, better than I expected for this place. She tells me to be careful not to slip on the stairs, how she had to remove the carpet from them and paint them when she moved in because the carpet was just so stained and smelly and awful so this is much better but it is a bit slippery so it’s a tradeoff, yada yada. We get upstairs and she explains how these cymbals belonged to her brother and he was a member of our local homeless population and he finally succumbed to his addiction, and shows me a family photo of the man. Ok. Eventually she leads me to another room where the cymbal is. I had asked on messenger if she had a drum stick I can use to test the cymbal, she had said yes, so I ask for that now and she produces what I learn is called a ‘tipper’ for a ‘bodhran’ — not quite what I meant but it will suffice.

I hit the cymbal on the bell and body. The woman makes some “mmm, mmhmm” sounds I don’t understand. Then I hit the edge and the woman makes a similar sound but I think this one is disapproving. Hard to tell. I go over each of the sounds again and the woman makes more sounds but they seem more agitated now. I hit the edge again and the woman quickly states that there are five young children in the unit next to hers. I look at the time and it’s exactly 6:00 pm. Not sure how many kids are in bed by 6 but I take the hint and stop testing her cymbal. I haven’t been able to really test it but from what I’ve heard I’m not nuts about it, and not nuts about the lady, plus she had listed it for sale quite a while ago but priced it rather high which is why it hasn’t sold yet. She recently dropped the price from $240 to $225, which isn’t going to convince anyone to finally pull the trigger on it, and indicates she doesn’t realize it’s not an especially valuable cymbal, and isn’t very flexible on the price. Even if I was interested in it I don’t know if I would have bought it from her.

Luckily for me, none of this matters at this point so I say thanks but I’ll pass. As I go to head downstairs, in my peripheral vision I see a man who I assume is her partner, standing in the kitchen facing me, not saying anything, looking like he might be a jump scare in a horror movie. Hadn’t seen or heard him, had no idea there was anyone else in here. Maybe my wild cymbal smashing woke him from his 5 pm bedtime. Whatever. I’m already irritated with this entire situation so I don’t look at or acknowledge him, can’t be bothered. The woman ushers me out the door just as quickly as when I came in, again due to the cat. I’m happy I didn’t buy yet another cymbal I don’t need. I get in the car and finish off my roasted milk tea with boba. I feel good now.

can’t stop the eeyore

Before we went to Adam and Kaitlyn’s Hanukkah/Christmas party a few days ago, I was on a hike with the dog, ruminating on random shit. I thought about how I should make a point to avoid talking about grim stories from work, my hatred for the human race, my lack of hope for the future, etc. Basically I just didn’t want to be an eeyore. I remember one Festivus I was telling some friends about a homeless woman I saw in a 7-11 store one night close to xmas, how she was soaking wet and freezing cold but had nowhere to go and no one who gave a shit about her, and how sad that made me — I love the holiday season so much because there are so many nice times with friends and family but seeing this woman like that made me think about how, for her, xmas doesn’t mean anything. She is just as cold and wet and miserable as any other day, and that really bothered me. This is what I was talking about at Festivus, when everyone is happy and feeling good and glad to see each other. It was a stupid, terrible thing to bring up, and Jenn pointed that out at the time, and it was funny but also eye-opening to me, like “whoah, I need to lighten up at these kinds of events. I tend to be a real downer.”

That lesson has stuck with me since then, and lately I’ve been feeling even worse about humanity than usual so I gave myself a really good talking-to on the hike the other day. “Don’t bring that shit up, no one wants to hear it. No matter how much you want to or how pertinent it is to something else being discussed, do NOT do it.” I thought, great, it was a good idea to remind myself of this. I’m all set for tonight.

Then I got to the party and met a nice chap named Mason. We got to chatting and before I knew it I was going on about single-use plastics ending up in the ocean and making their way up the food chain and how short-sighted humanity is, all my classics. Mason was fully down, I feel like he actually instigated that part of the convo, but still, I had smashed right through the resolution I had made just hours before. I shocked even myself with that.

I made a joke of it and told Mason then about the convo I’d had with myself that day and my determination to not be such a god damn downer at a party. I apologized and immediately switched to a lighter topic and all was well but jeez, it really hit home for me how diligent I’m going to need to be about this over the holiday season. Like, even if someone else brings it up, I can’t bite. Maybe give a polite “I agree completely” followed by something like “wow I love this song, are you familiar with The Police’s catalogue? It’s astounding. Only one bad song over five albums, that’s extremely impressive.” I can’t let anyone drag my Eeyore out.

holy guacamole

*INFO DUMP*

Boy, there’s a lot I want to write about right now. Last night I took the dog for a walk and was milling a bunch of different things over in my head, and I remembered the post I made about how I wanted a scribe to follow me around so I could dictate my posts to them. I’m still fully into that idea. Although a modern approach occurred to me yesterday: if I had a fancy phone I could probably download an app that does that, something I could talk to and it would write it all down. Then I could revisit it later when I’m sitting down and make edits and shit before posting it. That would be real nice but fuck man, I don’t want a giant annoying phone, and how often would I use that kind of feature? Silly whims like this don’t justify the production of fancy trinkets. Kids forced to mine rare metals in Eritrea, wallow in toxic shit and work long hours for virtually nothing, die on the job or get cancer and die young, or get shot for not wanting to work, etc, all so I can have a new phone. No thanks. You might think I paint a morose picture but that’s the reality of life elsewhere, and the guilt I feel for our complicity in it is crushing. I can’t buy most new things because of it.

Jeez, and that’s not even one of the things I wanted to harp on about. Let’s see, what were they.

Halloween 2020

Jesus was a lunatic/if he were around now, he’d be written off in a hot second

my cats love me

Chapter 1

There were tons of maple leaves on the ground when I was walking the dog last night. I had to kick my way through them, and it was a nice autumn moment. I started feeling wistful about this month and the Halloween season, anticipating watching lots of horror movies and building up to the big spooky night. But then I thought about what a non-event Halloween is going to be this year — no big parties, the haunted house I usually volunteer at has been cancelled, and the Halloween show I normally play with my Misfits cover band isn’t happening either — and I felt deflated. What does this month mean without the group events that make it special to me? I don’t know, and yeah this is obviously not a waaahhhhh moment but it’s disappointing, for sure. COVID-19 hasn’t really impacted my life too much except for a few things like this so I suppose I’m pretty lucky, really. I’d probably be pretty devastated if certain old folks I know died from it.

Chapter 2

I’ve been reading The Last Temptation of Christ and while I generally really like it, there are some parts in it where I think that the only reason people actually believe in this nonsense is that a) people believed fucking anything back then. You could say “I’m the son of god” and random strangers would say “he is, he is, I think I just saw angels flying around him,” and then more people would jump on board too. And for whatever reason, this Christ fella’s story really took off and people continued to repeat the lies and myths (or “miracles,” as believers might say) for thousands of years. So now here we are in 2020 and people still buy it because b) that shit has been said for so long that we no longer look at it critically.

I mean, think about it this way. If some vagrant came up to you on your way to the grocery store today and said they were the son of god, what would you think? Would you believe them, follow them, start an entire religion in their name? Or would you think, “this person is homeless and has mental health issues or they are going to try to rob me and I need to get in the store asap”? Guaranteed, you would choose the latter. So why is it any different just because some homeless guy did that same shit 2000+ years ago? Why do people believe that one guy was legit and telling the truth, while every other one has been total bullshit? I don’t know. People are fucked and really want to believe there’s something bigger and grander that makes them special, so much so that they will be wildly inconsistent in the way they treat vagrants making absurd claims.

Chapter 3

We have two barn cats. We got them when they were kittens. They were very timid of people initially, and I wanted to make sure they wouldn’t run away when we finally put them out in the barn to keep the rodents under control so I put in a lot of time making sure they bonded with me. I played with them, cuddled them lots. I remember the first times I heard them purr, it was incredibly satisfying.

That was a few years ago now. I think they’re about three years old at this point, and Jenn has fed them every day out in the barn since we put them out there 2.5 years ago or whatever. You think that with her being the food provider and me not seeing them very often, they would think of her as their alpha, but nope. They fucking hate her. They just scream at her, mouths wide and angry, until she puts food down. If she tries to pet them, they run away. Meanwhile, if they see or hear me in the yard, the come sashaying over and flop on the ground in front of me, make cute and tiny little meows, rub against me, climb into my lap, etc. If Jenn comes over at this point, they scurry away. And I can’t believe that they act like this just because I pet and played with them as youngsters, while Jenn continues to provide the essentials to them, day in and day out. It doesn’t make any sense. But I guess that’s domestication. It totally fucks with their brains.

Not that I dislike our dynamic. I like that they love me and hate her. It makes me feel special, for sure. I just can’t understand how their tiny domestic minds justify such feelings.

Epilogue

Well, that’s it. I guess I’m all caught up. See, I didn’t need children to be enslaved and die for me to do this. How about that.

^{Yeah, I’m obsessed with this topic. I should be, and so should everyone else. No one should feel ok about any actions that are tied to this. There’s no excuse for putting our heads in the sand.}

welfare wednesday at superstore

I just got back from grocery shopping at Superstore. That place is always a hotbed for people watching — last week I was texting Bill while I was there about this super weird old guy who was causing a real scene, there’s always something like that going on — but today was even crazier.

First I noticed a lady who looked like the worst case of a midlife crisis I’ve seen in years (skin tight Forever 16 jeans accentuating her tiny flat pancake ass, big glittery belt, cute belly shirt with a not-so-cute beer belly hanging over the top of her jeans, dried and cracked husk of a face looking like worn old leather) but on closer inspection I saw some telltale ‘user’ signs and realized there was more to her story. Her grubby (albeit much younger looking) bf was wearing shorts and a trench coat, always a fashionable look. This was the first sign something special was going on today.

There was a 20-something Polynesian-looking guy who was dressed funky as all hell, wearing a huge fur coat, bandana, and a ball cap. He definitely won the Superstore fashion show. He looked like a bass player in a funk band. He had a cool vibe going on that made him seem interesting to me but he also seemed a little dangerous — he stared daggers at me once or twice as I surveilled him from the bakery section. Side note: fuck me, I’m sick of the spell check feature on here telling me words like ‘surveilled’ don’t exist. Time to start using this fucking ‘add to dictionary’ option.

One couple smelled so strongly of stale cigarettes it almost knocked me over. That guy was wearing a red hoodie with the hood up and big old raver pants with a giant tear in the left knee. He was probably about 40. He looked like he was really trying hard to put out a “don’t fuck with me” vibe but he just came off as ridiculous. He looked too pathetic and loser-ish to be much of a threat. I don’t remember his partner except that she looked old, like she may have actually been his grandma or something, and didn’t have the same image as him at all. Maybe that’s why he was pouting and had such a bad attitude, he was embarrassed to be taken shopping by a family member. Questions we’ll never know the answers to.

There were numerous others I only caught fleeting glimpses of. Grizzled, sun-damaged faces that looked 70 but were probably only 30 or 40, and almost all of them dressed like 20-yr old white kid wannabe gangsters.

The dressing like street toughs from decades ago was so prevalent among the down and out that I had to wonder why it was such a popular look. I figure it’s because that’s the world they came from originally, and they probably haven’t spent much time reflecting on what they wear and what it says about them since then. They’ll probably dress like that until they die. Of all the problems a lot of these people have, for some reason I find this to be one of the saddest. I can’t imagine how they could look in a mirror and not ask themselves, “what do I like here? What do I not like? What should I do about it?” I know they must have other more pressing problems, bigger fish to fry, obv.

I assumed that these various characters were out in force because it was welfare Wednesday, and when I got home I confirmed this was the case. I’ve heard that it’s always the second Wednesday of the month, or the last Wednesday, whatever, but when I looked it up I found it’s not regular here in BC. In 2020, it’s on the fourth Wednesday of nine of the months, and on the third Wednesday of the other three. How about that. You learn something new every day. I might try to coordinate my grocery shopping with it in the future, it was that much of an experience.