Left Coast Adventures, Part 3
May. 22nd, 2004 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jamesqSaturday, May 22, 2004: The King in Yellow
I managed to go the entire day yesterday without remembering that it was the one year anniversary of my Mom's death. I tried to work up a good cry about it this morning, but just couldn't manage it for some reason. I blame my reading material.
So (as of this writing) I still haven't actually gone to May Crown. I'm going right after posting this entry. I just got a really bad vibe last night. Also the walk played merry hell with my back so I decided to treat myself with a trip to Harrison Hot Springs.
Now Chilliwack may be a one-horse town, but thankfully it's not a one-bus town. Even if they do run such a minimum amount I wonder how the town can afford it at all.
So bright and early I get up and grab some breakfast, then I catch a bus into the other half of Chilliwack and, having about an hour to kill, go hunting for the library so I can post the previous entry (the Comfort Inn advertised that they had a work station in the lobby, but apparently the hotel industry and the computer industry have entirely different definitions for work station. Hotels think it means having a place where you can plug a computer in. Bleah. For the record, nothing opens up in Chilliwack before 10 AM except for Value Village. I spent a monotonous morning wandering around the dreary, run-down collection of thrift stores and tourist traps that makes up this part of town. I'm getting homesick for the malls and hotel and that's rather disturbing.
The bus comes and I take it to Harrison Hot Springs which was a bit of a let down. The springs are a swimming pool full of somewhat-hotter-than-normal swimming pool water. It was relaxing and afterwords I had some lunch and sat on the beach.
BC has this unusual phenomenon that I never experience in Calgary - it's possible for it to be raining and you don't actually get wet. I swear to god, I sat in the rain for a half hour and nothing happened. In Calgary, when it rains (and being on the edge of the Palliser Triangle, we can go months with nary a drop) it's a fucking deluge. Lighting, thunder, howling winds with the water comes down in sheets and then it stops.
Oh and I got to see the motorcycle gangs of Harrison Hot Springs. Except they weren't a gang, their was just two of them. And they weren't on motorcycles, they were on scooters. So when I say motorcycle gang, what I actually mean is two surly teens on scooters. Hell, lets get more specific than that: Two surly teens honking and swearing at people while they look oh so cool riding around on matching sky blue scooters and wearing matching helmets and track suits like the two little kids from The Royal Tennenbaums, and maybe someone should kick the shit out of them on general principles.
Meanwhile, whenever I get bored, I pull out the copy of Fight Club I swiped out of Chris and Athena's bathroom. I figure they won't miss it because it was under a pile of Ryan's old Entertainment Weekly magazines from 1999.
First, Chuck Palahniuk writes a lot like Kurt Vonegut (not just in style and cadence - Fight Club deals with a lot of the same sort of issues of nihilism that Slaughterhouse 5 did). But man, what a depressing book. I wouldn't read it but it's this or actually watching the movie - and I made a promise to myself that I wasn't ever going to watch another David Fincher movie again.
But see, here's the problem: Everything I've been doing since I started to read the book has been mirrored by events in the book.
I ride on the bus, the main character rides in a plane.
I sit in a sterile hotel rom, the character's sterile apartment blows up.
I eat in a restaurant, the character's work in a restaurant pissing in people's food.
It's really unnerving. I'm almost afraid to go to May Crown in case one of the merchants is selling home-made soap.
I managed to go the entire day yesterday without remembering that it was the one year anniversary of my Mom's death. I tried to work up a good cry about it this morning, but just couldn't manage it for some reason. I blame my reading material.
So (as of this writing) I still haven't actually gone to May Crown. I'm going right after posting this entry. I just got a really bad vibe last night. Also the walk played merry hell with my back so I decided to treat myself with a trip to Harrison Hot Springs.
Now Chilliwack may be a one-horse town, but thankfully it's not a one-bus town. Even if they do run such a minimum amount I wonder how the town can afford it at all.
So bright and early I get up and grab some breakfast, then I catch a bus into the other half of Chilliwack and, having about an hour to kill, go hunting for the library so I can post the previous entry (the Comfort Inn advertised that they had a work station in the lobby, but apparently the hotel industry and the computer industry have entirely different definitions for work station. Hotels think it means having a place where you can plug a computer in. Bleah. For the record, nothing opens up in Chilliwack before 10 AM except for Value Village. I spent a monotonous morning wandering around the dreary, run-down collection of thrift stores and tourist traps that makes up this part of town. I'm getting homesick for the malls and hotel and that's rather disturbing.
The bus comes and I take it to Harrison Hot Springs which was a bit of a let down. The springs are a swimming pool full of somewhat-hotter-than-normal swimming pool water. It was relaxing and afterwords I had some lunch and sat on the beach.
BC has this unusual phenomenon that I never experience in Calgary - it's possible for it to be raining and you don't actually get wet. I swear to god, I sat in the rain for a half hour and nothing happened. In Calgary, when it rains (and being on the edge of the Palliser Triangle, we can go months with nary a drop) it's a fucking deluge. Lighting, thunder, howling winds with the water comes down in sheets and then it stops.
Oh and I got to see the motorcycle gangs of Harrison Hot Springs. Except they weren't a gang, their was just two of them. And they weren't on motorcycles, they were on scooters. So when I say motorcycle gang, what I actually mean is two surly teens on scooters. Hell, lets get more specific than that: Two surly teens honking and swearing at people while they look oh so cool riding around on matching sky blue scooters and wearing matching helmets and track suits like the two little kids from The Royal Tennenbaums, and maybe someone should kick the shit out of them on general principles.
Meanwhile, whenever I get bored, I pull out the copy of Fight Club I swiped out of Chris and Athena's bathroom. I figure they won't miss it because it was under a pile of Ryan's old Entertainment Weekly magazines from 1999.
First, Chuck Palahniuk writes a lot like Kurt Vonegut (not just in style and cadence - Fight Club deals with a lot of the same sort of issues of nihilism that Slaughterhouse 5 did). But man, what a depressing book. I wouldn't read it but it's this or actually watching the movie - and I made a promise to myself that I wasn't ever going to watch another David Fincher movie again.
But see, here's the problem: Everything I've been doing since I started to read the book has been mirrored by events in the book.
I ride on the bus, the main character rides in a plane.
I sit in a sterile hotel rom, the character's sterile apartment blows up.
I eat in a restaurant, the character's work in a restaurant pissing in people's food.
It's really unnerving. I'm almost afraid to go to May Crown in case one of the merchants is selling home-made soap.
