Life As Performance Art 50

My building is next door to a liquor store. This morning, before seven am there was a delivery truck making noise in the alley just behind the establishment. Now, our ex-mayor, that ableist bike airhead, Moonbeam, now finally gone, during the winter Olympics decided that stores could have delivery trucks come any time of day or night, no matter how many local residents were kept awake by the noise and racket, and since many of those residents are going to be low income folk bleeding dry the public purse in their social housing buildings, then of course, punish us further for not making shitloads of money, even if a lot of us also go to work every day and pay taxes. I have suspected for some time that liquor stores are targets and hubs for money laundering. Especially this one downstairs, which is privately owned. Heck, I am going to name them on this blog, even, and maybe someone who sees it, could help launch an investigation. It is called the Spirit of Howe and they are located on the 1200 block Granville St., downtown Vancouver. I suspect criminal involvement, for the really bad vibes I get off of people who work there. One fellow, a manager, looks like a scuzzy little drug lord, and I sometimes see him hanging out in front or in the back smoking a cigarette and looking quite sleazy. Another, was a staff of theirs who was very rude to me when I asked him politely not to smoke in our doorway. Then there was the owner, a fellow with a Middle Eastern accent whom I phoned early one morning about the noise from their delivery trucks. He was particularly rude and churlish. These do not sound like run of the mill entrepreneurs just trying to make an honest buck. They seem rather like scum, if you ask me. We have endured them next door for the past twelve years. Even though this neighbourhood already had its problems, the presence of that liquor store has only helped multiply them. Still there is that garden in the back, just across the lane, a hermetically sealed little paradise where that white-crowned sparrow is still singing. It is raining, the air is cool, and things are quiet again, so the cool sweet air of a damp May day is again blessing my living space. The blessing is always present, even if the forces of darkness make themselves visible. We are all like this. We each have in us darkness and light, shadow and luminescence. Unfortunately the darkness is often dominant, for our collective desperation to survive and make it through this horrid night that threatens to envelop us. We have to focus on the light. I remember the eighties and nineties, when there seemed to be a celebration of the dark, enfolding the earth as unfettered greed and selfishness became the acceptable coin for barter. Everyone wore black in those days, as if to celebrate evil, or perhaps as mourning garb for the beauty and light that had already died. We want it back, this light. We need the light. Especially now, when greedy and power-drunk potentates threaten to swallow us all alive, and transform our sacred earth into a dead black cinder whirling in space. I think we are teetering on a new threshold, and this could determine not only our next direction as a species of humanity, but whether or not we are going to survive to see the next generation. hold on to the light!