Looking Skills Are Important

11 May - After extricating myself from the house at far too late an hour I went to buy a coffee down at JJ Beans (the sullen waitstaff are getting more tolerable it seems). Sat myself outside and was engaged by a longhaired homeless guy who told me that life was all about the journey but told me he was settling here in Vancouver - he was nice enough but he was a bit of a droner and in the absence of any profound insights into the universe I soon escaped his clutches. Tried to watch a DVD called 'Dark Days', all about the homeless who live in the tunnels of new york (the mole people!) and recommended by the strange dude from Black Dogs video store. Video store clerks are amongst the worst of all those in the selling/service industry - always arrogant as hell, it's a mark of honour to have the most obscure movie tastes imaginable (some even claim to love Luc Besson films) and more bureaucratic than the Canadian government when it comes to late fees. In any event, Dark Days was surprising in that it made a film about mole people uninteresting - something I would have thought was an impossibility - didn't even manage to finish it and trotted down to Chinatown to watch American Dreamz, another smug 'intelligent' riff on politics in the world today. Left the cinema to find it pouring down with hammering rain so tried to sit it out with a chocolate from starbucks (the onlycafe in range that didn't involve getting soaked) and was engaged by a crazy man who claimed to be an adventurer but was probably just an escaped mental patient. In the 15m that we chatted he claimed to have just returned from the north pole (well, 80 miles from the north pole), was about to do a round the world trip in hot air balloon, offered to pay for a train ticket across canada for me, gave his place of birth as Ontario, Ireland and Boston, claimed to have been travelling for both 17 and 28 years and said I had really beautiful eyes (justifying this with ...'and man, that's comingfrom a guy!!!') - maybe the travel mode hasn’t worn off and i'm just still attractingcrazy people. Got home and watched a bit of futurama, well, actually a lot of futurama - about 12 episodes in total - I have to say that i'm not really upset about this show having been cancelled, five seasons is enough for an yshow - and this way when it goes out it'll be remebered as something brilliant and not somethingthat just went on and on and on and on ... In any event, the excesive screen watching has been improving my looking skills - already highly tuned by stararing at lots of mountains, deserts, forests, tall buildings, public objects d'art, cows, absence of bears, and about 15,000 kilometres of road, television watching involves different skills but give it just a few more weeks and I should be as good as any fat ass american. Also went out for a little while and played basketball with robert and a few of his workmates - all of them far too good and with me not in the best shape of my life - all a little bit breathless but lots of fun - probably not the best thing to be doinga few days out of a cast but no damage done.