Compendium!
The McGill Daily, Thursday, October 23, 2008
Lies, Half-truths, & A chode
19
My East Van education Rupert Common
The McGill Daily
W
hen people know you’re from Vancouver, they say one of two things: “Oh, cool, do you ever go to Whistler?” or, “Holy shit, have you been to East Hastings? I hear that place is seriously fucked.” I have been to both Whistler and East Hastings, and I must say, the two places have certainly earned their reputation. Where Whistler is gorgeous and blah blah blah, Hastings is very fucked. My sister is a social worker for a local “life skills centre.” The skills we are talking about here are not card tricks or “pop shove-its,” instead, the best skill to have is not being addicted to drugs. Due to rent being extremely cheap, and my sister having a spare room, I lived in an East Vancouver apartment this summer. It wasn’t in the same neighbourhood as Hastings, but it was lower class. I say “lower class” because I most certainly grew up within the money-stuffed upper-crust of society and attended a private school for my entire education. My high school’s campus had well-mowed green fields and an overweight security guard that kept any unfamiliar dog walkers from perpetrating the hedged barrier. This was much different from my sister’s pad on Fraser and Broadway, which had a lot of spousal abuse. I know
the neighbourhood is poor because I saw rats on the street, the subway was 24-hour, and there were four Laundromats within two blocks of each other. If my bed in Montreal is a single, then my bed in Vancouver was a complex fraction. It was barely as wide as my body and I was taller than it was long. But it wasn’t wider than it was tall, because that would make it a chode. In keeping with the East Van look, I made sure to bleed on my mattress. I did this via a savage bicycle accident that involved my entire shoulder and arm being road-rashed. The scab was like bark and I couldn’t sleep on it for over two weeks. Every morning I would look down to see pieces of my flesh attached to the mattress and pillow case. I never washed my sheets once and ended up throwing them in a smelly alleyway when I checked out. One evening I was assaulted by four drunk men. They asked if I had a smoke, I said, “No.” They asked where I lived, I said, “Around.” There was a pause. Then I said, “This neighbourhood is chill.” Their leader responded, “Not so chill when you bump into me and my friends.” I was in the midst of saying; “I don’t want any trouble,” when I took a drunken haymaker to the jaw. I managed to fend them off and run away. The worst part was I still had stuff drying in the Laundromat, so I had to go home and get on a disguise. This consisted of a hat, a book, and my sister.
The return of The Daily’s moustache contest! As winter sets in, it’s time to put away the razor and embrace natural insulation. Send your photos of your moustache to compendium@mcgilldaily.com by November 27. Figure A: What you might look like now, before having learned of the contest. It’s time to say goodbye to your formerly fresh-faced self, and take a trip to Facialhairville!
Figure B: Looks like somebody’s got a head start! Well done, Stephen, well done! A little patchy on the cheeks though... no matter, this contest focuses more on the upper lip.
Ben Peck / The McGill Daily
The Black Bird, in its natural habitat, unleashing a torrent of bomb-like manure onto unsuspecting Earthlings.
Getting shit on by a bird A Daily editor’s experience with excrement gives him the perspective he was missing in this game we call life
Ben Peck
The McGill Daily
Y
esterday a bird shat on me. I was walking along, minding my own business, munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when splat, I was hit. I actually caught a glimpse of the perpetrator moments before the fecal load had been dropped. Like a deer in headlights, my eyes glazed over as the brown clump bore down on me, a karmic meteor collecting all my debts to society in one fell swoop. At first, I was angry with this sudden surplus of shit in my life, but the positive features of the situation quickly began to present themselves. Well at least the worst possible thing about today has already happened, I thought; and my slick raincoat would
also make the cleanup process much smoother. “You’ve got mud on your face, you big disgrace,” bubbled through my mind, but much to my relief, my face had been spared. As I turned into the nearest possible building with public restrooms, I was shocked that no one I passed called me out on having shit smeared across my torso. No double takes, no, “Yo, bro, that brown shit across your jacket...wouldn’t happen to be shit, would it?” Had this occurred, I would have calmly replied, “Yes, this substance sliding down my chest is the excrement of another creature. It is the collective waste of another entity, and I am now covered in it.” Wiping someone else’s shit off of yourself is an incredibly humbling experience. It really puts things into perspective. I came to the conclusion that you can be literally anywhere on
this planet, and something could shit on you. And it will never ever help you wipe it off. This was not the first time I have had a bird shit on me either. My first and only other experience was in the eighth grade, during a class trip to Washington D.C. While I attribute less malice to the likely-newdeceased seagull perched above my bench than the aforementioned bird who had essentially strafed me, this earlier experience was much more pregnant with meaning. As I peoplewatched the various homeless scattered about the park from my cozy bench in front of the capital building, bird shit dripping down my pant leg, I reflected upon the significance of being shit on in the presence of one’s own government. And yes, I did finish my sandwich. Eventually.