December 5, 2006 - Tuesday

December 5, 2006 - Tuesday
cart theft and cheese curds
The weather in Ottawa: shitty.

With a strong chance of increased shittiness as we move into the night. The four-day forecast? Shitty all through the week with a cold front of Very Stupid Hats coming in from the north.

What can I say without boring you to tears with my non-life here in Ottawa –otherwise known as 'The 'Wa' or 'Canada's Nation Crapital'? I haven't been out much, spending most of my time in the basement with my father redoing the rec-room; stripping the kitsch faux-wood paneling, passing wiring through improbably small holes, re-flooring, re-plastering, re-painting, re-furbishing…re-tarded.

I did go out last Friday for my old friend Adam's birthday. Adam is a neurosurgeon and his girlfriend, the hyperactive Margarita (whose name Babel-Fish inexplicably translates to 'Daisy'), organized a party for him at a local bowling alley. Disco-bowling with black-lights and 70's clothing. Following this was a trip to a winebar, and then to the only after-hours place in Ottablah called 'Heaven' which is open until 4.30am. Painfully amateur shit. The evening was capped with me glancing over to the next toilet-stall to see a muscle-bound thug peering at me over the low wall. He was security and screaming that I should 'hand over the drugs'. Apparently the sentence 'this is the packet of mints you get when you fly Lufthansa' contained too many syllables and tricky vernacular for him to compute. I estimated his brain to be roughly the size of a rat turd with about the same capacity for rational thinking. Figures I would get tossed out of Heaven for being sarcastic about breath-mints.

Today I went to a nearby mall and had a wander. Creeping Jesus the amount of marketing and advertisement was overwhelming. Where in CR there are not enough choices, here there are far too many. This causes people to duck-walk around racks and shelves of dubiously named shit for hours eventually to throw up their hands in despair and plop their round asses in a nearby foodcourt where they have another one pound bucket of french-fries topped with cheese curds and gravy called 'poutine'; a particular French-Canadian dish which has crept –sorry, plodded—across the Quebec/Ontario border.

I found myself dazed with all the flashiness and red, green, and white sparkly shit. Christmas music piped through the PA system depressing me fully. Old people everywhere. There were many benches for despair-ridden shoppers throughout the mall but they were impossible to see as they were crowded by ancient folk looking like pigeons on a high wire. I resisted the urge to scatter breadcrumbs nearby, or try to startle them with loud noises and suddenly opening a large umbrella. The harsh lighting gave everyone bad complexions including me, having developed a large red zit at the end of my nose to celebrate the holiday season.

I overheard a salesman brandishing a vacuum-cleaner saying "…now, this vacuum is more floor oriented…"

This raised all sorts of deranged speculation in my head and did nothing to calm me.

Went to the ubiquitous Dollar-Store to try to find some cheap items, the place optimistically called 'Dollarama'. Above the aisles I could see little Canadian flags moving around the store at varying speeds and trajectories. Turns out the flags were on poles which were attached to shopping-carts. I had great difficulty trying to figure out the point of this and eventually had to ask. I was informed by an overly cheery cashier that they were there so that people didn't steal the carts. Ignoring the overall weirdness of this kind of theft I looked dubiously out the store entrance at the steep incline of the escalator going to the ground floor "Surely you must be able to catch people if they try to escape with one of your carts."

"Sometimes, we catch 'em. More often than not they get away."

One word to describe my overriding sense of being:

Maladjusted.