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.