Tuesday, February 24, 2009

i want luke wilson's haircut in this movie


going a bit stir crazy living in victoria. i keep having dreams about new york city. one dream i went there with jen and matthew. i was trying to convince jen to come hang out on bedford ave. with me, but she wanted to go protest pro-abortion in front of the city hall because she had twins. and my brother took a cab to the bronx and hung out with nas and jay-z in a recording studio.

the dream is always weird though... like i'll be driving a really long time in the dark through these windy hills back and forth.. it feels like oregon and there's pine trees. then i have to get out of the car and i listen to the crickets and walk across a parking lot to a train station lit by a single lamp light. the train takes us all to new york city, but we're travelling really high up in the air on these stilts.. like the train tracks are really high up and we weave past the Chrysler building and stuff.

lately i've been really missing montreal. or at least missing the magic feeling i had when i lived there. like every weekend would possess magical encounters with friends, and the days would consist of my cold cheeks walking aimlessly from metro to bus stop to some amazing restaurant. where it doesn't feel like everyone is judging each other like in victoria.
victoria is weird.

there is a real defensive attitude here. people seem really offended and ready to tell you off if you suggest any sort of ill manner or feeling towards living here. like a person's experience couldn't possibly be bad since this place is some God given paradise. like there is some social mechanism keeping people from being too complicated without being totally ignored or cast aside. like high school.

i try to remember that at the heart it's a small town with a mostly intrusive big city veneer. in my opinion the culture here is an illusion or rather like a hologram being projected from some far off other city like vancouver, toronto or the UK. it seems a shame that talented, interesting, self-sufficient individuals only have so much to work with. there is a lot of subtle pressure on individuals to fit in to a mold of "self-sufficient individual" rather then have some coherant sense of themselves. i blame it on the cultural illusion combined with the insular nature of vancouver island. it's like too much information is being shot through a very narrow pipeline. you see a lot of people that look just right and act just right.. but it comes off to me as so so wrong. like people think they are living their life, but they are just a cast member on "The Real World" and they don't even know it.

It's a shame because there are a lot of frustrated, lonely, poor, mentally ill individuals who walk the streets and must be alienated by the hyper-consumer culture of victoria. maybe it just shows up more because it is such a small place. It has certainly affected my mental health. I feel like i'm in a walking dream here. The "culture" here doesn't make sense unless you totally buy into it, or you are used to it and manage to be content with the subtle pressures and rampant hedonistic culture.

You have to be a certain type of person to fit in here. like if you aren't ____ then people kind of don't want to bother with you at all.
maybe i'm over analyzing it.

i like my new job however. but i'm starting to have my doubts and fears about where i'm going with all this. i don't want to end up a lonely guy who sleeps too much and can't socialize.
don't drink and blog...

1 comment:

maryannahardy said...

Victoria is the oppressive utopia