Fall in Ontario

Fall is a really neat season that we don't experience properly back 'ome. The deciduous trees in this city make for really picturesque scenes of leaves blowing around the road, which is yet another thing about Hamilton that just seems like it's from a movie. I need to get some pictures of the Escarpment Rail Trail, which looks basically like an illustration to go with The Road Goes Ever On.

The Road goes ever on and on     

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.

                                                                             -J.R.R. Tolkien  

To California or any place—

You know what they say, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. But in my opinion, it takes two to tango, and to call a spade a spade, “the more things stay the same, the more they change”. Ever since I left Newfoundland, I’ve come to realize you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but conversely, every dog has his day. Might this be my day? I first moved to the little town of Moncton: What a difference! Well, variety is the spice of life and so I said “c’est la vie” and grabbed the bull by the horns, so to speak.

In other words I left home in the usual fashion that young men and women the world over have been doing for years, without much clue and recourse only to the garbled clichés that society has provided for me to articulate my experiences. Moncton was pretty nice but I didn’t see much of it since I was only there for two and a half months. Work, at first, was terribly anxiety-inducing due to the fact that deadlines needed to be met minutely, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. I don’t know what their plan consists of, but it seems to be to churn out exactly as many Video-Lotteries before doomsday as they possibly can. At which point the zombies will hopefully be as addicted to Buckaroo Bill’s Slot Machines as they are to brains.

I made some friends at work sooner or later and got into a groove, and the time passed pretty uneventfully, even though every minute of my labour was marked in a sheet to be reviewed by superiors, placed next to a sheet ensuring I did my job properly and in order, which was then collated with another sheet indicating general completion of adequate work, which in turn would be ratified by a superior who had a daily timecard, to be finally added to a general survey of work completed at the end of the week (and a weekly timecard). THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE. It was some Foucauldian/Terry Gilliamean nightmare of absurdity working through a labyrinthine maze of arbitrariness coupled with a psychically devastating heaping of alienation finally resulting in the programmatic and inculcated madness of an automaton-ous (rather than autonomous) worker.

Working in an assembly plant manufacturing Video-Lotteries for a company that pays a pittance and makes half a million a DAY off your product while actively strangling any attempts at unionization and hiring temporary workers in order to hire/fire as necessary, alongside the most ceaseless and rigid bureaucratization I’ve ever witnessed/heard of; if you ever want to cement your radical-leftism that will probably do it.

Eventually I said fare-the-well to the best poutine I ever tasted (Newfoundland’s poutine is garbage and anyone who is constrained into eating it is garbage too), the boardwalks of Bouctouche, and the drudgery of wage-slavery to leave New Brunswick. Much like the Elves of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or the poor and desperate Newfies who seek their fortunes on the Alberta oil-sands, I too went West, travelling this time to London.

London’s a pretty nice spot. Food is relatively cheap, the University of Western Ontario’s campus is very scenic in the stereotypical American Ivy League lookin’ kind of way, and I have made some collegial English friends. The town is also pretty easy to get lost in, mostly because back in Newfoundland everything is so distinctive (c.f. Kevin Sooley’s argument, “St. John's is like Halifax if the guy who designed it slammed a flask before doing so”) and very little geographically or structurally repeats itself. Big cities that I’ve been to, Vancouver, Toronto, now London, have roughly uniformly streets intersecting in roughly uniform ways. This is exacerbated by the fact that London’s street names are some of the most generically Canadian I’ve ever heard of. All this is by way of excusing the fact that I got blackout drunk one night and wandered for three hours in one direction (east) when I should have been going in another direction (north) and ended up spraining my knee (somehow) and possibly encountering trains (?). But in my defense I still get lost sober.

Anyway, that is all I have time for now. But as they say, don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs (???) and farewell comrades.

Vancouver (is Great)

So there are some obvious difference between Newfoundland and Vancouver...

This is the demographic breakdown of Vancouver based on ethnicity from the 2006 Census. As you can see, it is a colorful palette leading to a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This is obvious wherever you go in Vancouver: there is a huge assortment of shops, restaurants and other emporiums for every bit of culture you can find in Vancouver. Sitting in the Pacific Center (a mall) food court one day, I could hear at least 3 non-english languages being spoken around me; in the lunch room at the BC Cancer Research Center every day I can overhear people talking in chinese, spanish, french...

In contrast, the ethnic breakdown of Newfoundland would look something like this:

Guess which slice is "White Caucasian"

When a foreign culture-based store or restaurant opens up in St. John's it is "That new Asian place" or "That fancy new Thai restaurant." Here it's just a restaurant. In St. John's, Sun Sushi charges absurdly (St. John's-ians: You think they're reasonable? They're not.) high prices for mediocre (it IS mediocre, if not outright bad) sushi. And yet it's the only place people go, because it's the only place they can go, and people think they're cultured for eating sushi in Newfoundland (oh ho ho). I'm not saying "Don't eat at crappy places in St. John's because you can get better stuff in Vancouver," you have to deal with what you have; it just sucks that that's all you have.

Similarly (not to belabor the point, I just find this amusing):

Vs.

Half the religions in the legend aren't even represented in the chart

Anyway, Vancouver does have some things in common with St. John's:

It gets foggy sometimes...

And of course it rains:

Like from October until April

My first month here, it hardly rained at all. In fact it was a very nice summer (there was a string of days in August where it was consistently 27 degrees; that lasted about 10 days). It's a bit amusing when people here complain about the weather on a day where the weather is better than anything Newfoundland sees from September until May (I must admit I've used the "They say there's only two seasons in Newfoundland..." joke several times in the past 3 months). Now though, it's rained probably 7 of the last 14 days, and I only expect that to increase between here and January.

Oh, oh! Speaking of nature-related phenomena, they have earthquakes here. One day in August (maybe September) there was apparently a 6.X Richter earthquake, the shockwaves of which could apparently be felt at the BC CRC. It was weird getting a text from my mom saying "Heard there was an earthquake..." and thinking "What the fuck in the world is she talking about" (Note: this so-called earthquake, if it can be so-called, was not news-worthy, leading me to question how mom heard about it at all). Also, the other day we had an earthquake drill at work. So yeah, definitely a weird experience, but it's still better than having a black hole to nowhere open up in the middle of your city.

Well fuck me to death in the head.

I'm going to wrap this up but before I do I wanted to address something. People say living in BC is expensive. Is rent high? Sure. Is it higher than Newfoundland? Nope. Are groceries cheaper? Yep. Do you save money by not having to own a car due to a reliable public transit system? Yep. The point being, those people are wrong.

The real joke is Warren's desperate financial situation.

Hamilton

Hamilton is a weird town. It's weird in a weird way, too. There's no massive culture shock or anything, but small things are really weird.

For example, the number of mullets in this town is astounding. I have hardly gone a day since I got here that I haven't seen at least one mullet, but it can often be many, many more. You never suspect a mullet either. Someone can get on the bus, sit next to you and look completely normal from the front, and then BAM, party in the back.