Commercial Street

Commercial street is my favourite people watching street.  Great coffee shops.  Joe’s is a favourite.  Today I’m sitting in the heated balcony having delicious breakfast.  I had the chorizo hash.  Madigan loved the burger paddy. Now I’m eating his fries.  

So far I’ve seen two women dressed in skirts over pyjama bottoms.  Not quite up to the Walmart Standards of attire but an uptown version.  It may well become the next fashion. Commercial has that community feel.  I suspect these two just see the Havana balcony as their own veranda.  They’ll live in one of the funky partitioned house apartments loved for the outdoor gardens tenants managed. There are a few apartment buildings but it’s not at all downtown.  People actually live as families in the houses too.  

Commercial is known as the second Davie street.  Davie was the original gay friendly street but in recent years more people have moved to this friendly neighbourhood.  The west end remains the west end but became a bit iffy with Covid and more violence and drugs.  

Commercial has a bit of that problem .  A friend bought a house and moved away a couple of years later not liking needles left in her backyard,  It’s a modern urban problem .  The DTES is the highest density of this but its effects reach out to West Vancouver and Kitzilano.  All one hopes for is that the light is greater than the dark. Like here on Commercial.  Mother’s with children, and even a couple of babies in strollers have passed in the last few minutes.  One doesn’t see yuppies and babies in the DTES but here they do.  

It’s also known for the artists and students it attracts.  Once the Italian sector as evidenced still by the coffee shops and huge tv screens always tuned to Soccer. I used to come here for the Italian foods, pasta sauces, rigaretto , delicious bread and fine sausages.  

We loved a Saturday meeting called ‘alive on the drive’ which attracted a half dozen or more of us as the meeting place before going for breakfast at the then avante garde Vegetarian restaurant before everyone because vegetarian because they could no longer afford meat. 

 I couldn’t help but notice the steak I bought a year or two ago for $5 is now $20.  Obviously global inflation is a problem but Canadian government financial mismanagement and corruption has contributed massively to the simple cost of living. The head of the Bank of Canada actually in an unprecedented response pointed the finger directly at the prime minister who has denied accountability for everything negatively like an underdeveloped teen age tyrant. It’s disheartening at times but thankfully history is replete with rise and falls of tyrants and bad times being followed by good times.  It’s simply best to maintain hope and faith.  Canada is still my home and despite extensive travels I keep returning here if only it’s the devil I know.  Obviously there are better places and better governments elsewhere but they’re simply not ‘home’.  

I heard a Trudeau Liberal Cabinet minister asked what he would do if he was elected in the election and he responded, “I’d probably go home and enter politics there.”  He consider Somalia home, not Canada.  I consider Canada my home and don’t respect uncultured miscreants like Trudeau who claims to be post national.  The Global Communist dictatorship agenda promoted by the rogues gallery of the UN under the new guise promoted by Schwab, today’s Lenin.  All the jet owning jet setting millionaires love to gather and discuss totalitarianism and bug food for the middle and lower classes knowing they’re continue to drink champagne and eat caviar at the next incarnation of Epstein Island.

That said I’m here on Commercial street robust with the college grads who often looking for work or working three jobs. This is where the centre of creativity is, the powerhouse of the middle class crushed between the peasant thugs and elite bullies.  The middle class doesn’t say ‘steal from the rich and give to the poor’ or tax the middle class more. They go to work and create.  Commercial Street is that hot bed of creativity with fashion boutiques,  and little shops and unique people from all walks of life. I liked that Rufus Guitars continued to grow my youth and now has large building here.  The ethnic foods have changed from European to Asian to Africans.  

My favourite second hand books store was here.  I don’t know if it still is.  I used to walk this street with George each week discussing philosophy, medicine and theology before he died too young, an old man who we never thought was old. I’m that age now.  My knee aches and what I thought were sailors sun wrinkles are looking more the influence of gravity.

Havana’s is filling up.  Great restaurant.  Love the waiters and waitresses.  We’ve had a lovely meal and some time to reflect on this incredibly diverse street and exciting street.  

I’m thankful for the times times I’ve had on Commercial. 

 

Los Algadones

I’m sitting in MediPlaza waiting for Sol optical to make me another pair of glasses.  They cost $140 and take 2 hours. They’re progressive prescription. I can have a pair keep extra pair in the vehicles.  It’s the facial bling.  I also bought some jewelry from Sandra and a leather bag from the married couple who sold Laura her purse and now for the second years had the purses I sent as gifts to the girls in the family.  

I have medications , antibiotics for the emergency kits.  Inexpensive.  

I like watching the young pretty MOA’s and dental nurses go by.. The old people my age are well tanned but aren’t fit like the locals.  Obesity and arthritis take their told on the old. Better to gain weight than be losing it as a result of a wasting disease.

I’ve worked all week an enjoy this time .  I’m in another country. I have disposable income and the prices are low.  I don’t have anything I really want but it’s comforting to know I could buy something if I wanted. I was thinking of a leather jacket but so far haven’t seen a thigh that appeals .

Mostly people are shorter here.  

A fellow with a motorcycle has pulled up and left it parked on the road.  I think I’d like to bring my motorcycle acros the border as an adventure.  I figure despite its value it would be safe here.  The guys at Bobby’s Territorail Harley figured I’d be safe in the few hundred miles near the border.  I read that Los Algadones is considered by the US to be one of the safest places.  So many professionals and such a wealthy community selling health and dental services to the norteamericanos.  

I’m thankful to be here.  I don’t like the line up to return across the border and I worry that I’ve spent too much money when I go through customs. I haven’t but it’s that border crossing anxiety reaching back to the difficulties I had young.  

I’ll be glad to use the washroom here and then wander about some more.  Exercise is good. I’ve a few small purchases like coffee I could make.  I want to get back to the border as the line up begins at 3 and it will be 2 when I get my glasses.

Thank you for this day. Thank you Jesus for all your blessings. Thank you for fun and pleasure. Thank you for confidence and wealth and creativity. Thank you for writing, this ipad and jewelry . Thank you for all the riches I have and family and friends Thank you for Madigan.  Thank you Jesus. 

Little Italy, Commercial Drive,Grateful

I’m here on a Saturday morning.  An utterly gorgeous young woman just walked by in one of those grey tube dresses that only perfectly fit young women wear.

It’s the people watching. The coffee for sure.  I’m at Continental and it’s always been one of the best. I’m having a delicious mocha prepared for me by a barista with curly cherry died hair and blond moustache. 

I liked that he complimented my gold earrings.  India gold from Nanda Jewelers.  I was asked at a medical conference recently why I had earrings.  They’re studs.

It’s been years but I remembered the first one. I’d known this wonderful old Jewish mariner who had one large gold earring. He told me the sailors and pirates had earrings so if they died at sea and washed on a beach this would pay for the burial.

I asked ‘Which side did  a sailor get peirced?’

I,d thought it was a gay things and didn’t wish to be seen as ‘coming out’ 

He laughed, his face, wind and sea wrinkled. “Not a few of us worried when the gay crowd began that. I’ve forgotten which side. That was decades ago . I don’t think it matters any more.”

My other patient a gay man also in his 80’s had told me these ‘secret signs’ had been really important when. He was young. It was illegal to be gay. “The police were forever trying to entrap people in those days. As soon as they’d get on to what was the fashionable sign, we’d develop a new one, like cryptography. Then the artistic ‘in crowd ‘ would  pick up on the old fashion all to the amazing confusion and consternation of the super straight  homophobic police. They really were lost. If anyone got caught we just figured they wanted to. Some of the  guys didn’t mind the jail.”

I had the single earring for a long time, proud of it. Outside work my life was sailing. An executive member of Blue Water Sailing Association, I was gaining skills in off shore sailing, dreaming of sailing to the tropics of Gauguin. I identified myself as a mariner, albeit amateur, until I sailed solo across the Pacific through winter  storms . Alot of the romance was lost. It became a mode of transportation and way of life. I became accomplished and. no longer needed to declare my belonging. I just was.. I loved sailing but I no longer needed the ‘identification.’ 

One day I got the second gold stud because it spoke symmetry. Besides by then I was no longer concerned to be called ‘gay’. There were a lot of other things I’d care to be called less.

A young man dressed in a long loose fitting suit dress just walked by. He really looked like any young business pperson  but truly unisex.  Handsome, beautiful, gay, straight.  I couldn’t say. He was fashionable, well dressed, and young.  I liked that. 

Immediately following him was a beautiful young girl in a bright turguoise mini skirt. A tight white tshirt emphasized her well formed  breasts.  She was definitely looking to be looked at.In comparison the young man  seemed to walk as if he just wanted to go about his business dressed as he liked. He did know he made a statement.I looked at both identically but the latter gave me a look that said, ‘I’m glad you noticed but if you look any longer than a second I’ll be offended.’

My dog meanwhile had moved in on the two delightful young women chatting amiably at the next table.  He has no sense of ‘timing’ and invariably meeting Fifi he spends far too long getting acquainting himself with her genitals.  Neither Fifi or their owner are ever bothered, female dog owners being like the horsey set, are more down to earth, less flighty and comfortable with animal behaviour. 

I’m embarrassed. I pull him back from nuzzling the young lady’s crotch. She laughs in response, “I love dogs and he’s my little dog who was just sitting on my lap before we came out.” It being Commercial Drive I wonder if she and her friend are Lesbians. I’ll never know.

I’ve just picked up my electric bicycle from Motorino Electric. That’s the Italian connection. I immediately thought of my friend Anil, spending weeks there painting and sketching. He’s posted his work for weeks on Face Book   I loved the fine details of his architectural sketches. 

It brought back memories of reading of the greats of literature in the `18th and 19th century doing the Italian ‘tour’. Byron and others. By contrast I’d loved the BBC documentary sent to me by Graham of the sacking of Rome by the Celts. Being Celtic I love all things Celt.  Which brings to mind sitting writing at a coffee shop in Dublin when I took Laura to Ireland and we searched the graveyards for our ancestors.

Laura always comes to mind when I think of Rome or Milan. She so loved our time there making every fountain and every church special with her laughter. I loved the Vespa ride. We’d been riding from church to church trying to put together the skulls and bones, matching the relics of saints.  

I loved the narrow cobblestone streets, the crazy traffic and the dinner in the cafe with outdoor tables on the lane.  The drivers and waiters would negotiate the passage of  cars through the romantic diners.  We complain of construction in Vancouver. Evening driving in Rome is a whole other matter.

I also think of Suzanne and George and Alive on the Drive whenever I’m here on Commercial.Fond memories. Where does time go. Joe’s on Commercial Drive was the first destination I bicycled to when I first moved  to Kits in the 80’s.  It’s still very much alive. More traffic but still the best coffee shop experience in the city, my favourite people watching. , even if one has to beware of the gaze police and the anti freedom of speech social justice warriors. 

 I love listening to the conversations from other tables. A couple of Huffington Post girls are nearby with their sensitivities and emotions while two men with thick accents are further over and talking business and women as naturally as any men of the world would.  For a moment I forget I’m in Canada.  

I like the Harley parked on the street. I am impressed with the haute couture black leathers a couple are wearing. I watched as they climbed off their machine and came over  for a Continental désigner coffee.  

A lovely lady in long flowing bright coloured flowered summer gown just walked by , straight black hair. Polynesian. Before her was a 50’s lady, young but dressed like she stepped out of a magazine featuring washing machines and baby clothing. She was voluptuous with fluffy western square dance skirt and baby blue frilly short sleeved  top.  Sensible afternoon shoes. No doubt in the evening she’d change to something more revealing with high  heals. She’d want to be most alluring when she brought her man a martini or Manhattan.

Lots of Vancouver outdoors clothes. Beach wear and gym wear and hiking wear worn for the trip to the market. Vancouver’s a kind of Village People athletic wear place. There’s a suspicion looking at some of the bodies the clothing never has served the purpose it was designed for.

 I liked the little tyke riding on his mothers’ shoulders, beach hat to keep the sun off his face.  The baby buggy another mother is  pushing is so sophisticated it may as well have been made by BMW.  Probably has disc brakes on the wheels.  

It’s a politically incorrect thought but I like that VPL’s are all but absent.  The man who introduced me to that term one summer of girl watching a decade or more ago, is now Ill and housebound.. Hard to believe we once were considered frisky. ‘Visible Panty Lines’.  When they’re absent it’s leaves tantalizing thought that only the thinnest fabric separates the naked from the environment.  The young men are commonly wearing their jeans without underpants.  I did.

Not us old guys, well, things change.  I’m considering going to the Scottish Games today. The first thought was whether I’d fit into my kilt. I’d needed help from Laura getting the belt buckledfor Robbie Burns Dinner.We’d needed all her womanly expertise with skinny jeans. Lying on my back on the bed the two of us got the waist buckle done up.

Then next question was what to wear under the kilt, knowing well, “nothing’s worn under a kilt, because everything is  always in perfect working order.’  

My elderly aunt told me when I’d commented on her concern one outing about locations of the washrooms, ‘they’ll come a day when you’ll be the same ‘. So let’s just say, I don’t know if I’d want to wear nothing under the kilt in public if there’s a shortage of toilets.  I’m thankfully always from ‘depends’ . But when  Laura and I were in New York the idea of waiting on the cold New Year’s eve for many hours, without access to a toilet ,made watching the Midnight Ball fall on the hotel room tv far more attractive. 

I like the girl’s pleasant educated voice at the next table.  She’s sat down with a friend and they are discussing biology and college instructors.

Gilbert loves it here.  So many dogs. He’s blind but the smells must be wonderful. He’s such as social little fellow. I’m suspecting my parking will soon be up. I locked my electric rad bike  into the box of my white Ford truck. Despite that It has been long enough in this district sadly known for drugs and theft. My doctor friend who’d bought a condo nearby left saying it was too depressing to have to pick up used needles in her doorway.

 I love Commercial. I love the shops where I’ve bought the best Italian spices and meats.  I love the coffee shop where the men watch soccer. My Spanish female professor friend could be seen there shouting at the screen. I love the bookstore where I sometimes see my brilliant orthodox poet friend. He always knows the most original literature and so often has guide my reading to the most insightful uplifting creation.

 I might ride my Harley over to Coquitlam now that Gilbert has had a walk and outing.  I missed seeing men tossing telephone poles last year. I do like the pipes and the elegant ladies country dancing. 

  

Continental Coffee, Commercial Drive, Vancouver

I'm sitting outside the Continental Coffee Shop on Commercial Drive.  The ham and cheese I ordered is delicious.  The regular coffee is even better, distinctive and robust. The atmosphere of the place is decidedly commercial drive, intellectuals conversings at tables beside beautiful people probably hooking up through on line services with the occasional computer geek working on something, or blogging like me.  The young and pretty blond is journalling. I wonder if she's in recovery or just a budding writer.  There's all manner of middle class on Commercial Drive.  Three decidedly gay men walked by with affected speech. An angry lesbian looked at me and smiled blowing all stereotypes. The ethnic Mediterraneans look like retired crime bosses but probably are just grandfathers.  Across the street the Italian Bakery is doing brisk business.  There's Wonderbucks trading company too. I've shopped there when I was furnishing apartments.
Right now I'm thinking of God.  Gilbert is lying on the sidewalk beside me hoping to smell ass.  A particularly attractive young woman just walked down the street with 30's style clothing and bright red lipstick.  I don't suppose she's horrny.  That's a pornography Hollywood myth in my experience.  Old guys sitting with MacBook Air computers at coffeeshops aren't at high risk of being molested even in Vancouver.
In the 60's and 70's the drug scene was more about awakening while today it's more about numbing.  The slogan then was 'Turn On'. Now it could be 'Turn Off".
There is a preponderance of tattoos on the street.  Even Gilbert has one for identification.
God either is or isn't.  The very question implies existence. You don't deny the Holocaust if it didn't exist. There's not a whole lot of folk invested politically in excluding Santa Claus from schools and court rooms.
It's called 'secular religion'.  A polytheism for sure.  Not a monotheism by any means. Rather 'man as the measure of all things' or to be politically correct and decidedly hip, 'woman as a measure of all things'.  All the promises of feminism seem not to have benefitted me and yet like so many causes I supported them.  Now I'm looking for the old dying white guy movement. I feel and think about death a lot these days.  Sickness does that to one.  Mysterious pains and aches and chronic stress combine to make for cracks where fear will enter.  Prayer and meditation stay hysteria.  A problem shared is a problem halved.
My friend George reassured me recently I was still insane.  I was concerned.  If I was sane I'd believe what the media was telling me.  The planet is dying. The world is overpopulated. The government is all thieves. The banks are criminal and lawyers are all nazis.  Communists and atheists are taking over the country and China is spying on bowel movements with nano cameras built into see through bum lulu lemon yoga pants.  The possibilities for fear are endless.
A beautiful long haired summer dressed woman is walking her leash pulling hound.  Gilbert is watching the dog.
God is an idea.  God is also an experience.  I've known spiritual awakenings and experienced the interconnectedness of all creation. I have seen the whole of the periodic table dancing in a whirling matrix about me with all the hidden names of chemistry labelling existence. The greatest of visions and beatific realities predated hallucinogens. Closed materialist psychiatrists attribute all this to early childhood sexual abuse, misfiring of synapses, or any number of explanations suitable for themselves. They're pseudoscientists at best, never appreciating the limits of our knowledge of even gravity. They're more afraid than I am.  That's what 'uptight' is all about. I prefer my friends praying to raise the dead. Why not.  Beats blowing up people with bombs.
An oriental man with red shoes and diamond earrings is talking on his cellular.  The mundane is so deprived of the sacred as to make science anything but holy.  I , like millions before me, have known telepathy. I know twins who knew each others thinking and anticipated calls half a world away. All such phenomena is disregarded by the main stream monetarists.  To even imagine a connection without an 'airway plan for profit' is a threat to the status quo.
God is the central exchange.
God is that hub in which all souls are connected, time is one, and all things impossible are possible.
To me it's called home and I've been too far away learning the things of this world and proving my competence with the heavy manipulations of this lower zone made lighter by the love of man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, children and dogs.  I feel as if I'm in a reality invented by a cat. It's serious that way.  Mario de Beauregaard's "Spiritual Brain', was only necessitated by the lies foisted on us all.  These days they deny the mind and say everything is the brain.  Why not deny God, in time we can deny man and return to pure aggression.
I envied the woman who passed with the long and healthy body moving in a single form fitting fabric like a futuristic dancer having landed in this world for a day of sight seeing. I'd love to John Malkowitch her body and mind and experience reality from a different locus.
God is in all the eyes of the world. We are his and her hands and feet.  God is one and many and , the one many and the many one. There are no words for the paradox.
Talking of God gets one locked up or crucified.  There are too many Christians these days without scars.  All one has to do is tell the truth and all manner of authorities will descend upon you.  The story of Paul is today.
The sun is out and  still I descend into the gloom of yesterdays.  Resentments and fears make up so much of the thoughts that circle the amygdalla like warriors about a wagon train.
She is passing with red hair and dark glasses, a slim but busty body and no need to wear black on this day.
Men used to wear cod pieces that brought one's attention to their genitals.  It is only when their penis is exposed that they become objects of sexuality. Women have done well to clothe men everywhere so that at least they can think in late spring without hormones distracting them any more than they already are.
Men's clothing conceals, mostly sloppy and loose fitting.  At least gay men celebrate their bodies.  The male suit jacket was developed from the design of British war uniforms.  As a man I've felt at war most of my life, competing with others daily, defending rights that are only rights if defended, begging resources promised but not given, refusing to accept the status quo which would have those I care for marginalized and why.  I was little once and fear that when I am old there will be no one there to help me.
But God.
I was in a hospital with a dangerous sadistic nurse.  She is memorable and yet all the others I have known so much more positively cannot erase the experience of her abuse of power.  But abuse of power is ubiquitous.  It's a subjective state in a greater whole and what Job was written about in the Bible.
My relationship with God is sadomaschistic.  The story of Jesus is one of faith and denial.  I have more faith in God than I do in myself.  I'm a regular Jonah refusing to go to Ninevah.  I'd rather be in Yaffa.  How many whales have I been swallowed by and how many times have companions felt threatened in my presence.
IA young girl walked by wearing a pink shirt "Love who you are."
My seat is bouncing for Gilbert is meeting another dog behind me and his leash is attached to the chair.  Now passing I see this was a pug.
There is a book of biblical Hebrew I need to study for this evening. I've a lesson to prepare and yet would rather look at  two pretty women scantily dressed walking proudly down the street.  "People watching" in Arabian countries must be boring in the extreme. Feminists loved to flaunt themselves in the day and then blame men for looking, before the lipstick feminist set made mockery of the their older dirty silly sisters.
I'd like to be at a nudist colony. I could go to wreck beach and see the phallus as privileged as the breasts of the city are.  The breast prominence is accentuated by all manner of wire and engineering. Stanfields offer me no such assistance.  No wonder men ride Harleys, yet women seem only interested in the cost of such machines and sociobiology prevails.  The egg is more dominant in behaviour.  I am reduced to the behaviour of my sperm.  Sociobiology is so much richer than the mythology of Marx.
A Harley has just driven by and I am aware I could be driving mine on a country road right now.
Instead I am here talking to God, thinking about God, conjuring God, praying for God, meditating on God.
Sexual orgasm is a sensation.  In my material world scale it's more exciting than a bowel movement or a pee but to one who has suffered limitation of either sex holds no comparison.  Sex can't compare with making money for the financially insecure or for someone who has been poor and equated poverty with powerlessness.
I've had ample opportunities and been blessed again and again by Grace. Luck is said to be God acting anonymously.
The sins represent excesseses.  Amorality revolves around sins.  Our laws speak most to sins.
There is the sin of gluttony.  All over the rich are obese and yet so are the poor.  Not perhaps in times of famine.  Historically some meat, like the physique of Marilyn Munroe has been preferred to anorexic Twiggy as defines against disease and famine.  Now our western world dies of excess. The narcissism about food acts out in all manner of variations, cook books, epicurean delights, restaurants, vegetarianism.  There's a regular pornography of culinary indulgence.
Yet, Jesus said, "man does not live by bread alone".  And so few fast when fasting was as sure a route to knowing God as prayer and meditation.  "Could I have a latte and a cucumber sandwich on whole wheat and flax bread, if I fast?"
Sex is dirty to the glutonnously filthy who have lost the feeling below their mouth and insist their daily involvement to all else in their 'taste' and 'gut sensation' is 'necessary'.
Crap.
But yes, the experience of a good bowel movement is increasingly appealing to the aging population whose daily ritual is to look forward to meals. Not so much for social conviviality as the respite from thoughts and memories.
Sloth is another favourite sin these days with unemployment, welfare, rest, vacation, leisure, and sleep and all manner of industry related to the bed and couch and lazy boy.  Disability is another industry which revolves around late night preoccupation and late day rising.  Inefficiency is disregarded and whole government agencies are devoted to promoting a lethargy of sloth that all insist is necessary. And may even induced or coerced. As some who really would do other are obligated to join this 'state' of affairs for political gain ultimately of others, not themselves.  They have their reward in sloth.
And there my mind slips into criticism and negativity.
I turn to God to lift me from the malaise of thought which begs for something to gnaw on as many seek 'no mind'.
Gilbert has been petted quite a bit by passers by. He's enjoyed his time. I just realized my meter must have run out
But my meter calls to me.  It measures time.
God may I know you better today and be more with you.