I finally figured out how to enable the title field

It's been like three years without post titles and I finally figured this out. I feel triumphant yet sad.

A Weekend of Good Eating

Friday
breakfast: mixed green salad w/ dijon and herb dressing, avocado, tomato, sauteed king mushrooms with caramelized onions and bacon, two eggs, old cheddar cheese

lunch: pork and mushroom jiaoze or potstickers

dinner: smoked mackerel, herbed Gravlox, baby shrimp, Alaskan Snow Crab, yam and potato salad, tempura batter beef, brussel sprouts

Saturday
breakfast: free range chicken laksa and a Hong Kong style milky tea
snack: Chinese chicken bun, mixed nuts
dinner: Mussels in a white wine and cream sauce, radishes dipped in salt with the stalks on, French bread, wine

Sunday
breakfast: Pacific Centre Mall food court Chinese food, bourbon chicken, chicken curry, shrimp and vegetables, an original Orange Julius half Pina colada

dinner: Roast Lamb, five kinds of olives, flavoured rice, stilton and gorgonzola cheese, pear, pepper pate, home made bread, salad w/ mixed greens red and yellow peppers, bocconcini, avocado and cherry tomatoes

Monday
breakfast: Roti Prata with leftover lamb

Chihuahuas on Main

I just witnessed a scene out of some repugnant romantic comedy. An oh so quirky hipster girl walking a Chihuahua with a pink sweater just crossed paths with an equally embarassing male yuppie on his way south with THE EXACT SAME DOG except this animal's sweater was green.

Their eyes met, she did a little hair toss except her hair was underneath a toque. He made some smug comment. The dogs sniffed each other and then they parted.

Main Street is not what it used to be.

Vancouver Violence

Vancouver has felt very violent over the last few months. The incidents I remember are the obvious ones:

A mentally unstable, yet harmles, man gunned down by police at Granville and sixteenth.
Seven men are shot, two fatally, in a restaurant at Fraser and Broadway.
The gangland massacre in Surrey.
The assasination of two gangsters at Granville and Seventieth and the suspected retaliations.
And of course, the latest internet viral craze, Robert Dziekanski's brutal death by taser at the hands of the RCMP.

There's really no point I'm trying to make with this post except to put forth my general mental state. What makes all this violence worse is that the location of the violence overlaps with my yearly, monthly and weekly routines. The victims are all people I share a very specific public space with. Likewise, these killings were commited by the apparatus of power that controls this space: gangs and the police.

This violence isn't new exactly. Much of my East Vancouver neighbourhood as a teenager was grow operations. I've woken up to the pop pop of a drive by and a SWAT teams in my backyard. At least three houses on our block had their front doors baterring rammed and their contents carried out in garbage bags. After the plants were removed from the house two doors down, the police dumped the agricultural equipment on the front lawn. My mom took some planters for her garden. Just yesterday I bought some milk at the local Hell's Angels run supermarket, Super Valu.

But somehow this latest stuff is more disturbing. I think it's because, while I'm never going to get wrapped up in gang violence (I hope), I can see myself in the face of Dziekanski or the animator suffering from depression gunned down by police for acting outside the rules of normal social behaviour.

It took some prodding, but I finally finished a song I gave up on months ago. Here's the MP3:

Potatochips

Trailer Parks are Substandard Housing

A week ago, my friend and I left Vancouver, planning to hit Seattle, Portland and the Oregon Coast. One thing I noticed right away was the trailer parks. Although we certainly have them in Canada (see The Trailer Park Boys), they're less apparent here than the large fields of cheap siding and rust glimpsed from the interstate.

Jokes abound about bad weather and trailers, the most common is calling trailer parks, "tornado magnets" or "tornado bait." This is nonsense of course. Bad weather hits other buildings too, but it's the trailer parks usually suffer complete devastation. These are homes with no foundations, built from the flimsiest of materials and completely at the mercy of the weather.

I'm guilty myself of using the saying "attracted to him like a tornado to a trailer park." The implications of such quips never occured to me until this trip. I mean, all kinds of attention is given to the shanty-towns of the underdeveloped world, even the dilapidation of American inner cities; but I've never thought about the sheer number of rural and suburban North Americans who live in substandard housing. There aren't a lot of tornadoes here in the Pacific Northwest but there's consistent flooding. Images on local TV of mobile-homes being washed away is common. Outside the staggeringly wealthy centres of Seattle and Portland one can see whole towns, endless subdivisions of mobile and manufactured homes.

Another interesting thing driving through rural America is the way the war manifests itself in the endless stream of bumper stickers, pins and billboards. In coffee-crazy Washington state, even the smallest hamlets have three or four drive-through espresso stands. The stereotype of Latte Liberals and Seven-Eleven-drip Republicans doesn't have much currency here. One stand we went to, in the parking lot of the "Faith in Action Thrift Store," dished out Cappucinos to guys in pick-up trucks. It's wall of local soldiers' names had turned into a shrine of sorts, flowers adorned with those little flags Americans love so much.

In the tiny town of Drain, Oregon, every filthy little thrift store was covered in "Support the Troops" stickers. A bridal boutique display had dresses in red, white and blue and the old man outside wore a stars and stripes singlet. Fifteen miles down the road, we arrived in a considerably different town: one with vegetarian cafes, a freshly painted pub/bakery/bookstore celebrating it's monthly Art Walk. Baby boomers and some even older dressed in the rural ideal (immaculate leather boots and LL Bean hats) waved large rainbow peace flags as they marched down the block with placards reading "Bring the Troops Home Now." We were the only audience.

The next day, in a suburb south of Tacoma on the edge of a highway on-ramp there was another flag waving ceremony, this one "in support of the troops." It's where I took this picture.

Happy birthday Abra!


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