ma thuggie, yo. straight up awesome. o g

So there I was with money in my pocket (or my backpack, or my bag, or maybe in my other pants, my debit card…somewhere; but there it was) for once.

There=Downtown Vancouver.

I’d gone downtown after two months of house-sitting in the leafy, unconfined confines of South Hill. It sure is peaceful there; the rowdiest the neighborhood got was when there was a dispute about a cricket game in the park out back. The biggest problem I experienced was deciding if the cat was rubbing up against me because she wanted food, or because she wanted me to clean the litterbox. I basically did nothing except cook (I ate the pasta puttanesca from this cookbook every meal for four days running, it was that good) develop a crush on Bobby Flay by watching Food Network 24/7, and hardly changed out of my Thuggie the whole time except to (very occasionally) shower.

Glamorous, it was not.

So, on payday I wander downtown to pick up my mail and get there a mere ten minutes after the main post office has closed, which is one-half hour earlier than ANY OTHER GODDAM POST OFFICE in the world, so. Fuck.

Now what do I do? Without my MooCards. Without my new Wikileaks tee shirt. Without my bills.

Oh. I guess I’ll find a way to go on.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a glam-deprived blogger in possession of a decent paycheque must be in want of a Chanel makeover, so that is what I got, along with a LARGE bottle of Chanel 19 for which I have been pining for years, and my very first truly grown up red lipstick. Yes, extravagant, but I hadn’t been paid in close to three months, so it qualifies as a necessary act of Salvation Armani. As I said to the makeup artist, if you can’t find a good red lipstick that suits you at Chanel, where can you? And good luck trying to find, let alone deal with, the bio-contaminated, sticky testers at the drug store.

But I still had some money left, so obviously I had to go, like the guy in the nursery rhyme, to Market. To Market. Where I ran into my friend Hez and the cadre of Hezbians who run the bar there. Jay Jones, bar superstar and officially Canada’s Best Bartender, bought us a round, which is something that happens all the time to people who have money and not frequently enough to those who do not. Spot prawn sashimi, three cocktails, and a small pizza took care of some more of the extra weight in my wallet, and then I staggered back to the DTES to catch the 12:30am bus to Casa Metro.

My pal Hummingbird604 came down to the bus station to hang out at McDonalds with me and see me off, and it’s a good thing he did, even though his first remark was, “What happened? You look like a girl!” I explained about the makeover and made the now-obligatory bus joke about being eaten by a mentally ill cannibal somewhere in Northern Manitoba, and obviously that angered the gods, for they had a surprise for me.

In the lineup an obviously mentally ill man took a liking…no, a loving…to me and decided I was the most glamorous creature he had ever seen.He would not leave my side, although it meant cutting off 30 people in the line. He would not stop standing too close, staring too hard, asking sincerely if I were a celebrity and coming thisclose to asking me to run away to Toronto with him.

Must have been the lipstick.

In any case, I was pretty sure it was going to be difficult to shake this new Klingon, so we subtly conspired to let him get ahead of me in line. That way he’d choose a seat and I’d choose another one, instead of me choosing one and him plopping down beside me, as he’d apparently decided the gods had decreed must happen.

Enter the bus driver.

I hadn’t particularly noticed him, but he did notice what was going on, and while he did his best to discourage this poor, rootless fellow about taking the bus all the way to Toronto (even though he got a ticket for less than $200 somehow) without any luggage or anywhere to go there, he eventually had to let him on. Then he turned to me and said, “Ma’am, can I ask you to do me a favour?”

“Sure,” I replied, thinking (with inner groanage of a severe nature) maybe it was to keep an eye on the guy so he didn’t wander off at some podunk gas station and get eaten by coyotes or something.

“Can you sit in the front seat? I like to pick and choose who I put there.”

Can I? Could I? You BET I could. Sure, it was a night run, and sure, the reading lights don’t work in the front seat, but just as surely I’d managed to pack my books all in the luggage that I’d checked, and not in my backpack, so it was all good; I wasn’t missing anything. I spent a Klingon-less five hours looking out the panoramic windows and looking forward to soaking out the road stress in the infamous hot tub, which I had put on Foursquare when I was up here in January.

And what’s new with you lately?

The view from Ruralopolis. The ACTUAL view.