The crowd on the patio of the Brew House smelled vaguely of coconut oil, spilled beer, heightened expectations and seething resentment. Celebrating the first long weekend of the Summer of Recession, the thirsty, assembled masses were a riot of colour. Skin, covered in high-tech fabric since sometime last October, soaked in free vitamin D and morphed before indifferent eyes from ghostly porcelain white to ghostly porcelain white with a wash of brilliant crimson. A familiar, chauvinistic sense of national pride in besting our American neighbours in the rush to summer by one long weekend was tempered by a nagging sense of colonialism in celebrating a dead, forgotten Queen.
I was lost in low-key reverie, amused by a family drama unfolding at the next table where a bossy big sister, perhaps age eight, was shoving limpid french fries into the cheeks, ears and forehead of her younger, besieged brother. She kept saying something about "it's the attack of the killer frites." Tears and temper were both near exploding as their parents intently thumbed vital text messages into respective Blackberries. "Whistler's gr8; wish U were here."
Two young homies, decked out in team colours - Canucks and Blue Jays - were embraced in an animated argument about the manifold failings the Canucks had to address in the off season to mount a better showing in next year's playoffs when one of them had what apparently passed for a brainstorm in his ever-tranquil corner of the world. "Why is there an off season anyway?" he said excitedly.
"In some places, there's barely an on season," his insightful friend countered, sparking the discussion into a nationalistic rant about the merits of repatriating the Phoenix franchise back to Canada, leading, in turn, to arguments for and against Winnipeg versus Hamilton, an argument that struck me as being a bit like having to choose whether you'd rather hit your right thumb with the hammer or your left.
But it was one of those kinds of days. Too cold to swim, too hot to ski, just right for arguing irrelevant minutia on an inviting patio over multiple refreshing beverages. I was lingering, in hindsight a moment too long, intrigued first by the spectacle of the retro-Goth, twentysomething couple, dressed like black holes and made up to look like the illegitimate love children of Ozzy Osborne and Alice Cooper, grilling the waitress on the relative merits of Lifty Lager versus Black Diamond Stout. The guy - a guess on my part - thought the stout was more in keeping with their wardrobe and dark outlook on life while his girlfriend, channeling some long-simmering latent optimism, liked the alliteration of Lifty Lager and kept repeating it over and over, "Lifty Lager, Lifty Lager...." "You're so bourgeois," he fired back, touching off a heated debate on Marx's theory of class, the misinformed scope of which left me believing they'd studied Groucho, not Karl.
But all good things must end and this good thing ended when the warming rays of sunshine were abruptly obscured by a dark, shambling cloud. "Yo, Bro," spoke the cloud.
Into each life some rain must fall. Longfellow said that. "J.J.; what a pleasant surprise to see you." I said that... lying. Actually, it wasn't such a bad day to run into J.J. It's not like I had anything that actually needed to get done. And I had a few bucks in my pocket to pay for the beer(s) I knew he'd eventually cadge off me, J.J. being as predictable in that endeavour as he was unpredictable in every other way.
"What's up with the vampires," he said, nodding to the nattering black holes, still engaged in a call and response argument that had devolved into a faux Hegelian dialectic on the use of torture during the Bush administration.
"Dun'no," I replied. "You know how sunny weather affects Canadians in the spring. What'chu up to these days, my long-absent friend?"
When last I saw J.J., he was decked out in a gaudy, flowerprint muumuu in anticipation of the Hundred Pregnant Man March to protest Olympic overspending. Today he was dressed like any self-respecting private eye, at least any self-respecting private eye who slept with his clothes on. Some people look merely wrinkled; J.J. had perfected a look closer to kinked.
"Tryin' to get a job," he said.
"Come again? Sounded like you said trying to get a job."
"That's what I said."
"Don't take this the wrong way but... aren't you pretty much un-hirable by any stretch of the imagination?"
"There's lots of things I can do," he protested.
"Yeah. But most of them are illegal, dude. Besides, in case you haven't heard, there's this pesky recession. Most businesses are de-hiring these days."
"That must be what's making it so difficult."
"Yeah, that and the 20 year gap on your resume. What do you have on your resume to explain your seeming lifetime of unemployment? CIA spook? Black ops guy?"
"Funny. I believe in creative writing. I tend to craft my resume to fit the job requirements."
"You mean you make stuff up."
"It sounds so... illegitimate when you say it that way. I just tell people what they want to hear."
"So where you applying."
"The muni."
"I thought they had a hiring freeze on. Besides, what can you possibly do that they need? More to the point, how would you possibly survive there? I mean, showing up for work is a threshold requirement... even there."
"Has anyone ever told you how negative you are? If I let all these little barriers stand in my way I'd never get anything accomplished."
"You never get anything accomplished anyway," I shot back.
"I can work in IT. I think that's the latest job I applied for."
"IT!? You can barely work a pay phone, J.J."
"Okay, maybe communications. Or maybe both. Like, I think they need something on the muni website to distract people from all the contentious issues they're dealing with."
"Wha'dya have in mind? A spinning spiral to hypnotize people?"
"No. I was thinking more along the lines of those puzzles they have on kids' placemats at some family restaurants. Actually what I was thinking of is a 'Where's Kenny' sort of takeoff of Where's Waldo. We could have a little comic book Kenny popping up in places all over the world. And when you find him, a little cartoon balloon pops up with a pearl of wisdom... 'Sustainability is as sustainability does,' something like that."
"Oh yeah, I can see that landing you a dream job."
"Well, I've got to do something. The whole private eye thing ain't gonna get me a new jacket for next winter."
"Ha! So that's what this is all about. Hey, that gives me an idea."
"What's your idea?"
"I'll tell you next week."
