Red Sun and Carlton Square, Vancouver

The forest fire smoke has invadedthe city.  First there were the wild animals. The racoons. The coyotes. Always there were the rats.  But now bear are walking about the city.
Driving to work in the Miata, I hear  conservation officers facing downs tons of fur and claws.  No one wants wild animals as neighbours. Not even the animal activists. Their anxiety doesn’t extend to beasts and  snakes.  Just the warm and cuddly.    Now the forests are ablaze. Everyone is fleeing. The world over people have been huddling together in the city.
Climatologists are smug with satisfaction. These new age prophets foretelling gloom and doom are rubbing their hands with glee thinking of the money.  Prophecy has always been as lucrative as prostitution.   See I told you so.
The eerie haze is causing asthmatics to stay inside. The sun is red now.  Red faced.  What shames a sun. It might as well be Mars returning our call.  The very planet come to visit after all our probes.  That's eerie.
Nearby a young Asian woman walks by, short shorts, push up bra, silk top, heels. Her legs go on for ever. There is no mortality to her youth.  She has pride of fertility.
I am old.  I look away from her to the red sun.   She may be smoking but here in Vancouver the smoke is everywhere. The renewal is happening in the hills we live in.  Burnaby Mountain. Burning bush. Burning forest.  What will God dream of next.  The irony is that the parking lot pavement is finally saving us.
Now a vixen and child have stopped. She is taking an iPhone picture of the red sun. This is no time for selfies. There's a red sun, she tells her child.  So much is new to them they will only realize the novelty years hence when people tell them and they admit they were there.
 There is no relative certainty.  The globe is hanging there, alien. Ghostly like a moon. The very sun we live by is bleeding. Blood red.  Climatologists smugly shout  the world is ending.
Silent Spring was written in my childhood.  Millennial Madness of computer fall out is gone. The music died. Belushi died.  Kennedy is long forgotten but Munroe lives on. Elvis lives on.  
Growing up in the Cold War and daily threat of  nuclear annihilation toughens one up.  Todays terrorists are pansies compared to Russia and America.  They're just cells.  Bits of metastatic cancer. We're just mopping up.
The great Satan, Russia would rise again.  But then so might Hitler, Old Bony. Nothing would surprise me.
Consciousness is permanent.  Time passes in a blink of an eye.  Sleep is the rub.  Subjectivity and objectivity are illusions.  Two sides of the same coin.  Memory is mutable.  Neuroplasticity and relativity compete. You are my lover in another dream. But she is too young now.  I am older.
My dog is happy on the street.  The red sun is nothing to him. His nose perhaps wrinkles with the smoke smell. What it does to doggie bitch butt can only be imagined.  Smoking.
It’s weed city.  Wow man.  Crime really does pay.  The forest smoke conceals the skunk smoke.  It's actually pleasant not to smell the rancid.
I’ve done a day of work in the heat of a new office.  I left at noon and bought a fan. The air conditioners and fans were sold out at Walmart. Canadian Tire still had a fan or two but the air conditioners were gone as were bigger fans.  I got a little fan. I liked the breeze it created.
I got through another impossible withering day.   I am traumatized by the disruption of moving. I can’t find records. I can't find books. I long for an end to the chaos. I fear the coming deadlines. So many demands. Finances are always a struggle.  The high cost of change, imposed or chosen.  I empathize with Greece but they’ve had their holiday.  I could have gone to Tunisia. It was on the list.  God is good. God is great. There are alternative realities. I'm thankful for mine.
This lighting is eerie.  I could be on another planet.  One with a red sun.  The picture doesn’t do it justice. It’s red, like lipstick.  But not sexy.
It’s that kind of day.  I’m jet lagged perhaps.  Just tired from Monday.  Shell shocked emotionally individually.  I"ve listened too much to the the terror of individuals struggling with marginal existence. My work is a life on edges.  I long for the smooth and seamless.
I’m having trouble cheerleading. I find it difficult to rally.  There’s a sense of never ending crisis.  The media makes a civil war seems imminent.  No a real war.  Not religious war.  A Canadian sort of war.  Civil.  Mannerly.  Polite. No bang. Just a sizzle.
It’s better to laugh. It’s better to see the humour. There’s no more news. Just propaganda.  In face of which we pray.
Little girls are walking down the street. They’re impossible tiny for maturity.  Precious.  Immigrants can be that way. Different sizes. Different shapes. They tend to dress the same though. 21st century women.  I suspect they're aboriginals from South America.
I’m considering moving along. I only stopped for a coffee. The black hole of work had sucked me into the centre.  I felt such relief at the end of the day when I could pee. Now, with a coffee and a juice I feel almost human. Except this isn’t the earth.  The sun is red.  The light is different.  I can smell the burn. Not like flesh.  Not that horror. A light scent.  The eau de cologne of distant mountain burning. Not a bad smell.  If one didn’t know what it was.
Life is like that.
Renewal.
Phoenix rising.
My day has aged.  I was young this morning.  Now I’m old and weary.   I will head home soon.  Maybe watch tv, mindless like an old man, in a nursing home.  The life of man in a day.
Only last week I was in Ireland.  How good does it get?  Now I’m sitting in Vancouver. Contemplating a red sun.  It's all coming home.