Best of Van Number Three

The constant surreality.

When we first moved here, we wandered around for the first three or four months saying: Huh? WTF? No, really, WTF?!

As the city and its denizens moved in awkward and bizarre configurations and were seemingly oblivious to the circus around them. Carnivalization, a la Derrida? It's been years since Intro to Lit Theory and my critical discourse sure ain't what it used to be, not that it used to be much, so I won't get all high discourse on y'all. But constantly, daily, odd things and strange people traverse the architecture of this city, and the strangest thing of all may be that nobody else reacts.

So Saturday night, after the launch of Shift & Switch, I'm standing in the Helen Pitt Gallery downing the third or fourth cup of shockingly good keg beer -- because I had to get kinda drunk to deal with the whole event, which is a whole 'nother post that I'm working on. Carefully editing. Wouldn't want to give anyone the wrong idea. About me being bitter, or a bitch, or anything. (Say it isn't so!)

Anyway I think I was talking to Colin when, unaccompanied and with nothing more than an "excuse me," in rolls the mayor incumbent.

Now, in Cowville, King Klein once visited my elementary school when he was the Minister of Education. I might have been eight at the time (but I could still sense an un-educated hick!) And because my personal politics are more small "p" than big "p" I haven't had many chances to meet civic leaders in person. But in my mild state of inebriation it struck me as rather odd that an incoming mayor would be:

a) visiting a poetry reading
b) after it had finished
c) after ten in the evening
d) without any handlers or bodyguards

Seriously, WTF?

Only in Vancouver my friends, only in Vancouver.