This makes me happy.
A city dressed in shadows, constant cloud. It was nice to be out of it, alive under sunlight, meeting new people, a trick I have all but lost in Vancouver. Ran out of people, somehow, ran out of patience. Things, moments, miniature adventures dressed like tedious hotel rooms, anonymous, sterile with interstitial furniture.
Getting away was good for me. I’ve come back from Seattle with e-mail addresses and stories of dancing all night, interesting possibilities, and more than one bit of revelation. (Apparently someone’s hard-wired into my system. This would bother me, except that at least I’m aware of it.)
Friday night was a failed attempt to see the laser graffiti up from San Francisco, (they couldn’t get it to work, so after having us stand in the rain for 45 minutes, they gave up, packed up, and left), and Duncan’s yearly party, aka the sort of evening that goes late. I didn’t get home until almost three, at which point my friend Dan came over to crash the night rather than going all the way home to Deep Cove after working downtown, so three turned into four which turned into my alarm, the snooze button, the alarm, then the realization that I was going to be late unless the taxi managed to get me downtown in under eight minutes. A brilliant start.
Once I was on the bus, everything was easier. No one even asked for a ticket. The border snuffled a little at my silly hat, but smiled wryly at my jokes and let me go, and I was picked up immediately when I arrived by a young man with wonderful eyes who canceled out all possible nervousness intelligent people might have had about getting into a strangers car. (I am discounting myself from this group, we all know I get into strangers cars far more than my mother would like). Ten points all across the board. The party itself proved to be a little much at first, as there seemed to be a table-top game being played in every room, but I met some of Silva’s friends outside and stood in the sun long enough that the currents of the house had time enough to shuffle some people out who weren’t obsessively rolling dice.
It was comfortable, settling in, and I’m sorry I didn’t get more contact info for some of the people I spent time with. One girl in particular, short black hair, eyes like jewelry, Erica? She braided my hair into thin whips that fell out over the course of the evening. I didn’t even catch when she was gone the same way I’m not sure when the sun went down.
Eventually the games wound down and the bid to go dancing began in earnest until Sebastien Jon Karl, the man with many names, his friend Robin, and Dan, our host, piled into the car to drive downtown to a place called Noc Noc. Red, black, a giant nailed to the wall above the bar, arms spread, lights in its eyes. I laughed as I ditched my coat, glad at the scurrilous decor, already moving to the music as I rolled ear-plugs out of napkins at the bar.
I hate that Vancouver doesn’t have any all-night dance clubs. I used to practically live in such places, bruised feet every morning, sore muscles at least twice a week, so Noc Noc was perfect, minus the early crowding. (Until the floor, mostly dominated by people who’d been drinking, maybe too much, thinned as the hours went by, I continually felt like killing people who didn’t give me space to properly move.) We lost Robin somewhere around four in the morning, but adopted Steele, a here-to-actually-dance with an uncanny resemblance to a 20-something Antony, and kept going until dawn. It would have been longer, but the prospect of soaking in a hot tub as the sun came up was too nice to pass up. When the sky started showing blue, we threw ourselves out of the club, and drove back to Dan’s house around seven, deciding not to get out of the water until it was officially tomorrow. And, with the fogged lucidity that only the blind-tired can have, that’s what we did.
Breakfast was next, ridiculously huge portions at an odd diner papered with an anarchistic riot of crayon illustrations. From what I could see, the surreal drawings had been created by every skill-level possible. There were scrawls that were barely recognizable as possibly maybe it’s a tree if you squint to hyper-detailed anatomy studies of cthuloid anime characters who may or may not have been sodomizing a smurf underneath a wiccan symbol. (My favourite was a purple realist cartoon of a stripe-tailed lemur wearing a yarmulke and holding a menorah with the words JEWISH LEMUR at the top.) Highly entertaining. As I’m told it’s a 24 hour diner, I’m almost certain to be back there this week. Maybe I’ll get a picture.
We met with Kris there, which was great, and when Sebastian and Steele begged out to go sleep and get boots fixed, she came back to Dan’s house to hang out a bit, meet the cats, and drink some tea before driving home. It made me smile when I found some blurry pictures of us together on my camera during the bus-ride back to Vancouver.
Dan made sure I got to see Gasworks park, finally, before I had to go, for which I’m thankful. That park is some sort of fairy-tale, like the model ruins of an abandoned Wizard of Oz city. It hit home, standing there, why so many artists come out of Seattle, a sense I’d only lived in the edges of before. Suddenly I felt a biting urge to move there, escape Vancouver like a bad relationship to go stay with the neighbor, no matter the guns and dirty politics. Impossible, as of yet, but a new thought. A nice one.
I’m going back for Mike’s gig on Tuesday, though no plans have formalized yet. I don’t know when I’m going or how long I’ll stay.
