Wednesday, August 03, 2005 Its Neat When The Dead Rise

The chunk of steel that was in my hand is one of the most sophisticated lead delivery systems available in the world. This particular one happens to be Gold Plated. The Desert Eagle .50, A pistol that could stop a train. So its an odd question to ask why I'm shooting this pistol in a shopping mall. In Zombie literature, one of the key principles of a zombie attack is that the recently undead keep certain instincts from when they were alive. This is the reason why so many zombie movies are set in shopping malls. It's also why it makes perfect sense to have a shooting range located in the building. When the owners of the West Edmonton Mall created their glowing alter to consumerism they thought of every emergency situation. Those clever bastards know the score. Unknown to most mindless shoppers, on the upper level of the mall, tucked away in a labyrinth of staff access hallways is a shooting range filled with Libertarian Albertan gun nuts just waiting for the word to unleash hell fire. In the event of such an emergency, the mall is also equipped with 5 working submarines, a team of trained Seals....and a water park. I swear, you can look it up. Las Vegas had an illegitimate child and abandon it in Edmonton, it is the mall. On a given evening you will see someone walking out of the mall's "bar district" dressed in a bathrobe drunk out of their skulls shooting guns on a range.

I work with a lot of Polish guys, which is great, because when they meet other Polish people, they become really good friends. Because of that, I can now phone a crazy Polish taxi driver instead of paying the fifty bucks to get downtown. The only problem is, he is constantly drunk. When the bombings in London happened, he gave his "crazy man in a wooden shack" advice. "Take a bullet and dip it in the fat of a stuck pig -Kurvu- then shoot them those bastards -Kurvu-, all but one, let the word get out and they wont go to their heaven when they die, Kurvu". Kurvu means "Dirty Whore" in Polish but is used as often and as liberally as the word "fuck" in English. He also has a lot of opinions about Polish Socialism vs Democracy, most of its in Polish, so I don't get it, but the just of it is "Poland Good, Democracy Bad.........Kurvu". While he's explaining all of this I didn't have much time to deal with the intense shit he's saying. Mostly because he's looking over his shoulder at me and waving his hands instead of watching the road and too involved in the conversation for dealing with details like holding on to the steering wheel. And ofcourse its when he's explaining his opinion on international politics to me that I notice the overpowering smell of booze on his breath. Its in weird times like that, the strangest details jump out at you, and only until after its over do you realize what they completely mean to the situation you were just in.

Edmonton, like most of Alberta, is like a Disney franchised American pavilion. The province is built on Oil. There are more classic cars here than I've ever seen in my life, and all of their drivers work for Haliburton. The Christian Reich reigns supreme and everyone is fat from too much freedom pie. When the plane crash in Toronto happened, the local news reported on how it effected Edmonton. Recently there was a million barrel oil spill just outside the city. Protesters came out in force. Not greenpeace, not activists. Shit no, Kurvu! Instead it was a collection of yuppies going through happiness withdrawal demanding that the spill be cleaned up faster so they could return to their cottage life. Life in denial.

The police here are fanatical about homelessness, you will not see someone sitting on the street corner, they get pushed out too fast. On Canada Day some guy asked me for a cigarette, looked like he needed it as well. Before I could even reach for my pack, the police told him to move along. The culture here is completely hemogonized. Edmonton city council heard that Toronto rakes in a ton of cash from Caribbana and decided to do the same. What they got was a civic centre with a performance of some vaguely Caribbean dance set to "Day Oh". Performed by 20 or so overly tanned middle aged white women dressed in African print dresses who had recently returned from tourist fortresses in Jamaica. I talked to a Sudanese guy at a bar recently, he couldn't believe I knew where Sudan was and what's going on, atleast to a limited degree. As I finished my conversation, Someone smashed a beer bottle over the head of some kid. A fight went on and as the bar cleared the biggest complaint I heard was "That idiot got beer all over me!" The guy was taken away in an ambulance.

The sun never sets here, I woke up in a cold sweat my first week. 3:30am, the fucking sun was up. The Magpies chirp and squawk doing loops in the air. This place is surreal, but subtle. Different in ways that creep up at you so that you don't notice for a while. I came out here for work reasons, important for my future, what I ended up with was an unintentional two month trip to a re-education camp for the American Nightmare.