It all happens in the same day.
"It's Life", you must say.
Push out the riff-raff to get your own way.
And paddle downstairs, all the way to Bombay.
Leave your coat at the Doorway
Leave your feet on the floor
You'll emerge on Tuesday
And return here no more.
. It's worth little of the paper its written
on, but websites are cheap talk and we'll get to the needle-point, and
move on to Greener Hills.
It
and it's cousin (the American Hotel) have served as depots for the
marginally-deranged for as long as History has been taught. In
this section of Vancouver's "arm-pit", there IS
NO deodorant. The arm is amputated. The pit is the blackened hollow
core of humanity, another of the embarrassing symptoms of Capitalism.
The ambience is purgatory redefined.
It sits on Main Street,
just a few scant blocks from the "old" police station, where
the once-boundaries of traditional "skid row" have now blurred into
Strathcona, Yuppie-Centric Yaletown and Dum Sum City. Being a
drug addict in the lanes of Downtown East Side (DES) is now almost
a trend-setting position. You could be movie star. You could
be a city councillor in your spare time. 
The "Tunnel Of Love"
you see Above doubles as a
"drive-thru" crack and hooker pickup service, but for our own
shabby books, it's simply yet another naked wall that has been clothed in squalor of locally-grown organic experiments.
in search of Graffiti Grandiosity, for
a dime or a dollar. We find a mural, menacing in nature of a tree
with Teeth, seeking Human Souls for a Dinner Date. Investigating
further, we create a Panoramic portrayal of said tree below:
Besides minimal
comprehension of Color Wheel fundamentals, the brooding and somber nature
of this piece doesn't exactly "brighten up the Foley Family's picnic
lunch" in this god-forsaken drain-pipe.
And to Challenge your Gastrointestinal
fortitude ever further, we present (yet another!) SEZ1
PANORAMIX shot
of another fascinating Mural in this deplorable Tunnel of Cobalt Love.
Another soul-munching
green-slime-monster-of-hiroshima-type specialty. Reminds you of
late-night, low budget horror flicks that we used to see on snowy channels
when we were juvenile delinquents.
But it speaks of
devoured souls in an honest, no-frills way - a brutal metaphor
for the decimated lives that plague the Downtown East Side.
Graffiti can be a form of "art" but it also can be a form
of pain, and ultimately, therapy:
an expression of the silent howling vampires that suck the blood from
the internal genius of human expression and spit out the corpse on a
long rainy Hastings Night.
Alone to contemplate what the next Disquieting Move
will be in your questionable existence. Alone to monitor your own
bowel movements - should you be adversely affected by what you've seen.
|
|
|
|
| Alas, alas, a lock on the door. Come back for your beer &
crack at four. |
Electrical Wires lead into the Central Electrocution station manned
by bikers. |
Every Pig-sty needs their garbage tags. |
Even the parking signs are bruised & broken. |
We
move on to greener pasture and sanitized manure. As colorful as it
is, and as poetic and melancholy as she groans, the Downtown East Slide
is no place for tea, no home for me.
Amputated Human Souls and their
various prosthetics. Wounds
and Band-aids, all made of hemp and human fiber. Alcohol to
disinfect and re-infect and preserve and dilate the pupils of Night.
Blue Billy at right, screams a
toothy 'adieu' to all who pass through. He
will miss your blood and the fleshy sinew of your concerned forehead. But
fear not, although the Derelict days of the Cobalt are numbered, Blue
Billy will live eternally in the Night, welcoming you in, and spitting
you out when he's done chewing your soul.
