Monthly Archives: July 2007

Canada Day '07

Thumbnail: Brownies and oatmeal cookies

Thumbnail: Chaos stretches

Fresh veg­eta­bles and peanut but­ter on burg­ers. A low-key deal before leav­ing. I’m lucky enough to be one of the few.

It’s mad­ness out­side. Madness at the stops. Madness on the bus. People row­dy, drunk and drink­ing. People wear­ing Canadian, drink­ing Canadian, speak­ing Canadian, bear­ing the stan­dard on cheeks and arms and hats and bod­ies. Kids, kids throw­ing beer bot­tles out the win­dow, pour­ing Smirnoff ice in their emp­ty water con­tain­ers.

It’s passed mid­night, dark­ness out the win­dow, and reflec­tions press them­selves on me. She looks through me at him and I can see the love tri­an­gle in her smile.

Ambulances pass us by. People face-down on the ground. Police ques­tion­ing wit­ness­es.

Everyone’s at the same par­ty, but me.

Looking for some calm in this chaos, I turn up the vol­ume to drown them out.

you’ve got the lot to burn
a shelve of pig smoth­erd cries
is there a spir­it that spits
upon the exit of signs?

is any­body there? (spines in a row)
these steps keep on grow­ing long (spite as an arrow)
bay­o­net tri­als rust pro­pellers await

no

nobody is heard

But my calm is no less chaot­ic.

A Staple In My Tea

I just found a sta­ple — a used, bent sta­ple — in my loose leaf Mao Feng tea from Nihao Tea House. I don’t know if I can trust Nihao any­more, which is unfor­tu­nate, as it’s the only tea house in the vicin­i­ty.

The girl who works there is some­what of an anom­aly; a Canadian-born Chinese, I’d say only a few years younger than me, wear­ing a Mickey Mouse shirt. My gen­er­a­tion of CBCs usu­al­ly adapt to the Canadian way of life, eschew­ing the cutesy cul­ture of Hello Kitty, design­er sta­tion­ary, and stuffed car orna­ments. An impos­tor, by banana1 stan­dards, like a rogue sta­ple among some tea leaves.

  1. yel­low on the out­side, hol­low on the inside [↩]