You only really get one hour of downtime in a neighbourhood adjacent to a
Chinatown - the old men are gambling until 4 am and the old women are already doing tai chi in the park by 5.
...
Due to a strike of Translink employees in the Greater Vancouver area I have been doing an uncharacteristic quantity of walking recently. A couple of days ago I plodded 32 kilometres, which is a lot more wear than my feet are used to. Generally I would have employed my bicycle, which was in the shop undergoing repairs at the time. Travelling the route by bus I tend to curl up in the back with a book, while the rigours of predicting the movements of automobiles occupy my mind when on two wheels. The mere monotony of foot-after-foot, however, is practically automated reflex, leaving me at the risk of boredom without sufficient distraction.
Boredom while crossing a bridge can be a dangerous thing.
So I scrutinize my environment, looking for inconsistancies and errata - evidence that it's all a mock-up designed to fool me into believing that other people live around me - and artifacts of other people's lives to convince me of the frightening complexity of the simulation. I take a particular and perverse desire in graffiti and reading things I pick up off the street and more often than not, they appear as the sole constituents of my day logs.
aha! A page from a notebook!
Delicious. Clearly emerged from the pen of some high schooler... a rough draft? It's too bad I only have the one page preventing me from framing it in any deeper context.
One block later I catch a flutter in my eye and, following it, come upon another page torn from the same volume.
Dear Mark - today I work 10-6
Same handwriting - and now I have a name to work with!
Another page follows after another block:
For you to turn your back on some one in time of need makes you a weak person and for you to try and tell a person what to do makes you cold. There was no reason to take any thing going on with your insacuraty to my work not only did you loose my respect but that of many others
Hm. Presumably the "you" here is different from Mark who was invited to work? Or did the scribble-over indicate a change of heart?
Another block, another page:
that you just can't share with others. I think If you are as good of a friend to Mark as you say you are you should step out of our relation ship compleatly Mark makes his own disitions. The one thing understandable is no longer will I let you take advantage of him
Makes me curious in Mark's POV. I know at age 16 I was just dying for someone to take advantage of
me... halfway to the bridge, the pages are coming faster and closer.
Dear Mark - I don't know what I could say to make you feel better just know
Nope, looks like she forgot what it was she didn't know what to say.
Dear Trish - Coming from my eyes I see some one very confused although I under stand you are hurt I can't seem to find the fairness in you'r actions. Some time ago I came to realize that every one is different but the one thing you & I have in common are feelings toward Mark. I need to let you know...
the reason for the message was because you'r coming across as a person waiting to give approval of Marks happy ness when all you'r causin him is pain & confusion. you need to know that I am very disapointed in you. Ovosially there is something going on with you in regards to you'r lack of interest of resolving what you have caused
About the same time I start feeling guilt for traipsing through someone's emotions uninvited, the trail ends. Perhaps the scatterer turned at the last right, but I definitely have enough to mull over to tackle
the bridge before me.
Hours later, East Van is found to have more paranoid-conspiracy-theory graffiti and less high school sentiment. A very different but still-quite-interesting(-to-me) literary idiom.
Lose-o-matic slots in Laug
hlin NV casino MSG's & sec
urity are stupid! Awful!
Deplorable! Terrible! Putrid!
Disgusting! Repulsive! They haven't any feelings.
Who was the smart guy in social work who issued thesauruses to the rabid homeless?
Wait a sec, I was reading that upside-down, coming across it on the sidewalk from the wrong direction.
Strange. It seems to me that I'm thinking
more when I'm walking, at least relative to my being able to close my eyes and magically be delivered to my destination by wheeled fossil-fuel furnaces.
Really? Why don't you tell us more about it?
Around the corner from home, I am issued one final guerilla missive:
Regrettably, no one is to be found on the premises for me to carry through with it.
in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...