Anyhoo... this morning, I decide to take the dog a walk to Trout Lake, that is after being nearly knocked down by some Chinese woman driver when I took him round the block. I know we joke about it, but I swear Asians can’t see out the side of their eyes; backing into me in the lane, as she was, four times, despite my shouts indicating that she was putting me in peril. One would think that shouting oi would be the same in any fucking language, but apparently not! Then I get looked at out the driver’s window with that gormless look that Asians can have; wide-eyed (well as wide as they can manage, anyway) but certainly wide mouthed, and a face as blank as an iPad after a 20hr flight. And no apology, I mean, you don’t have to when you don’t actually hit someone, apparently, nearly having their exhaust pipe shoved up your arse doesn’t count, oh no-o... the gormless look will suffice, asking just what the hell you were innocently walking along for in the first place - just like the one the Asian woman gave me a few days ago too. She was dwarfed, and I mean dwarfed, by a huge pram in Safeway, I’m talking the kind that nannies from Victorian England used, pushing it at full speed down the biscuit aisle and ramming into me, not having looked to see if anyone was coming up the other way, and yes, I saw her not look. No apology there either... just that same expressionless gawp until I stood with my own accusatory stare flinging my arms wide in disbelief that she hadn’t even acknowledged it, the contents of my basket everywhere. But bruised banana be damned, I was getting a solly from that fucking bitch, who wasn’t gonna offer one for all the tea in China - or at least aisle six. “Herr-oo,” I say, and she continues to gawp completely and utterly unaware as if I’m just some kind of a madman - which of course I was by that point. Now it’s not just Asians of course, lest you think ‘oh my God, I can’t believe he’s being so racist,’ God knows I take the piss out my own culture all the time, mention it all the time in my books actually as I do culture in general, and anyway... what is it one says in situations like these... ‘some of my best friends are Asian?’ No, those actual Chinese women could have been anybody of course, but I can’t help but think, ‘anybody’ might have profusely apologized for steamrolling me the way these two slitty-eyed bitches did (don’t judge, they call me ‘round eyes’, and its what we all think when we’re angry - unless you’re Prince Phillip who always speaks like that). But every culture has names for every other culture - French are the ‘frogs’, the Germans, ‘sauerkraut's’ or ‘boxheads’, and it’s not uncommon for people to say ‘its suddenly a bit ‘nippy’ in here’, when a Japanese Tour group enters the room and I could go on. Point is, when you come from where I do, name-calling is actually employed in a lighthearted, affectionate way for the most part, or like I intend here, just to vent.
No, its inconsiderate people in general, I feel no hatred for I am enlightened, I am a child of the world... of the uni-fucking-verse... I love everybody and everything – well unless your name happens to be Jennyfer LeClair - but that’s another story and I vented that by depicting a vile character with the same name in my book, Prickly Scots (any similarity to people alive or dead to me is purely coincidental). For instance, the fat white Canadian guy behind me at the ‘fifteen items or less’ checkout after the China crisis had unfolded, might’ve just wished that he hadn’t sniped that I perhaps had more than that in my basket, judging by his gawp, as I, using my best (or worst) Scottish and furious face, stared him in the eye screaming: ‘Dae ye waant tae fuckin’ coont them son ,’ - we use that in times of good and bad, ‘son’ - going on to say that if there did happen to be sixteen items, then did he really expect me to go to another checkout? Would that not take about the same amount of time as the checkout girl to swipe them? (and yes it was a girl before you accuse me of being sexist as well). I mean, come on... are people really that stupid, that pedantic about something that is obviously meant to be just a rough guideline, a rule that is meant to suggest no huge shopping-cart-load-fuls, e.g. those shopping for the fucking month or for Kate Plus Eight? But I guess at least we line up here; they don’t in many European countries, pushing to the front in shops and bus stops etc. Frigging Eurotrash - and I say that with love for apparently I am European.
But that Canuck guy hung on to his Tootsie Roll and his Cheesy Wotsits like Kirstie Alley to a sitcom after I was finished with him, I tells ya. But it was my poor gas pedal that took the brunt of it as I drove back to the sanity of my sanctuary, which I knew I should never have left in the fucking first place; grocery shopping online looking more attractive all the time. I used to joke that I’d love to live in a cave - but only if it is high tech - and I’m really starting to think I would love that now, becoming less and less tolerant of the public at large than ever before - of every cultural denomination.
Oh but I digress, and how... that’s a record even for me... but this fucking city is pathetic man, with all its money-grabbing rules and the people who run the place. You take your dog to the park, any given park, even the one at the end of the block, and they’re all being patrolled by City of Vancouver trucks these days, the latest bi-law designed to go after people like me who loves and cares for a dog and just wants to throw a ball around for it to run after on occasion, but no-o, not anymore; they must be on a lead at all times. Unless you drive a couple of miles, to take the dog to a patch of only a couple of hundred yards and risk your dog’s neck to any amount of the ‘big vicious guys’ also vying for the space allocated for the entire fucking city’s dogs, as well as each other’s Chuckit balls, you’ve had it. And if you dare to try and have that kind of fun with your family pet in this international city, you get fined on the spot now; they’re every-fucking-where those bastards.
Of all the dogs that need homes in this city, a dog friendly city apparently, you’d think they’d go a little easier on those of us who do undertake to look after one. But no, this city is too busy out looking for their daily quotas from otherwise respectable citizens. Well, that, and when you go two miles over the limit, catching us on cameras for the slightest little thing, even going through amber, and using those monies, as well as my taxes, for building apartment blocks for the insane and the homeless, paying for their safe drug centres all over the fucking joint (pun intended) and putting them up in Parisian hotels for the fucking Homeless Olympics... and yes there is such a thing. (But it begs the question, if they’re street people, why do they need to be put up at all?) I’ve started to wonder, now that they seem to be considered a bone fide sub-culture in this city, would it not be politically correct to spell homeless with a capital ‘h’?
It’s $250 if you don’t pick up your dog’s shit you know, which isn’t generally a problem in this city, most, like me, right on that, yet a human can defecate in public, as they frequently do here even on main streets. Don’t know how many times I’ve seen that, and all the fucking police do is wipe their arses for them, and not to mention holding their needles in bus-stops while they roll up a tatty trouser leg and get a good vein going. Oh well, where else is a homeless person to go, I suppose? In their fucking subsidised luxury condos, that’s where, in their nice comfortable druggy centres. Don’t get me wrong, I know there are many unfortunates, they’re addicted, some are born that way, but why I am paying at every turn for the choices many of them made in life? For the troupes of homeless that head west every summer for BC’s climate, to come and insult us on our streets, and whose Pit-bull dogs and the like can get away with shitting everywhere and nobody says a word to them for fear of getting an ice-pick to the head?
But still, that’s what you get when you close down the local loony bin and leave them to their own devices; living among society, as they did here – but, even if they were made homeless, at least they don’t have to live by all the dictatorship rules the rest of us do; it’s not worth it, you see, going after those kinds; they can’t pay the fines, their welfare cheques would never stretch. I often wonder why I don’t join them, start claiming from the government, I wouldn’t have to struggle so much at all, and I’m sure life would be a lot easier if you didn’t have to pay for nuttin’.
Perhaps not... but there is one thing I have decided; if what I perceive to be rudeness really is just a cultural difference like they say it is, then I ain’t apologizing for nuttin’ from hereon in. You’re gonna get more than just a blank fuckin’ stare as I ram my Scottish sensibilities doon yer throat in future! So... do excuse me; its not rude; just the way we do things in Scotland; we’re well known for being miserable bastards across the fucking pond, ye ken!
Oh yeah... and am gonna get a forty foot lead fur ma fuckin’ dug anaw!
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