On Scum and Other Social Nuisances

Whipping through the bowels of the city like a great worm on amphetamines, it felt like we were tempting fate in highly obnoxious fashion: covering lots of ground at a time when travel was advised against—and using public transit to do it. The ominous Swine Flu hung over our heads like an evil reaper waiting for someone to slip up, but we weren’t about to start worrying about karma either.



When the subway train squealed to a halt, eyeballs rolled upward from their fixation on the floor to the doors when they slid open and a troll-like man thundered his way in to the carriage.

He wasn’t German, but immediately upon entry he yelled “nein, ich liebe!” and shot a Hitler salute from his chest. Then he motioned with his hands as if he was shooting up the carriage with a fully loaded automatic rifle.

The worm—a creature of routine and schedule—had no objections to this new ride-along. The doors shut and we were on our way again.

He was wearing a tattered Lamb of God tee and a green army jacket not unlike the ones found in heavy abundance at army surplus boutiques. Everything about his character was rough, probably conditioned that way from sleeping on outdoor hot air vents and simple hygiene negligence. I expected he’d known a hard life. His gait was clumsy like his knee had been twisted in some unnatural fashion long ago, but the subway hand rails—things of equal grime and viral danger—helped him find a seat.

I turned to my girlfriend and basically whispered, in a cynical and repulsed “wow.” The single syllable summed up all of the rejection I harbored towards this lonely, angry creep. I figured he got a lot of that, but I had no sympathy for this breed of dung.

He caught it though, and he spat out a sloppy “shuut uup,” likely inflected that way by some hard and scary drugs.

I had irritated the beast. I felt like an unprepared anthropologist in uncharted territory who’d just offended a local. Whether governed by the city’s municipal dictums or no, for this hard man the subway was a liminal safe haven for everything and anything he wanted to throw at me. In the city you can get away with most kinds of foul nature unnoticed, why would its underground caverns of speedy transportation—filled with people tuned in and turned off listening to MP3 players and reading the Saturday news, clenching on to any distraction for dear life’s fear of boredom—be any different circumstance? In the recesses of any metropolis decorated heavily with loud looking bulletin boards and digital marquees, who would expect any less? Besides, everyone has their own things to do, and they’re not about to tailor their busy days around little peculiarities. When you drive by one of those tragic accidents, you turn your head to check out the damage, but how often do you stop? The general reaction is “not today thank you kindly. I’ll be late.” Tragic is right.

Our particular carriage was pretty empty, carrying my girlfriend and I, this freak fascist, and a couple of dreadlocked pot enthusiasts wearing leis of marijuana leaves. Before the man clambered in they were enjoying some chuckle-full conversations about brownies, conspiracies, and hacky sack. But upon his vulgar entrance they all fell silent and kept to themselves. Stoned and silent, they were like statues of absolutel neutrality—grey and eerie: appropriate décor for city transit.

My girlfriend told me, “don’t look at him” as if I could blend into the background and he was some dumb animal with a Crestaceous intellect. I figured her logic wasn’t too far off—his head was so full of blind hate it seemed like a respectable estimation. But I was denied that confirmation when he demanded my attention immediately afterward.

“You see this?” He had the right sleeve of his jacket rolled up to the elbow. His left hand was holding his right arm so that his palm faced me and I saw the inside of his wrist. Where you usually see forked veins and parallel tendons, I saw the infected result of a heavy drug hunger. A red and purple pain hole with the black center hollowed out, likely irritated by nervous scratching and digging with dirty nails. And then he turned his hand around so the back of his hand faced me, and he launched his middle finger to the sky.

He muttered in his impeccable English, “I kill you.” Suddenly he was bigger than Swine Flu or the plague, and I felt the grip of immediate danger.

I wanted to call his bluff and scream scum of the earth; call him infectious human waste and the Nazi muck I wouldn’t soil the treads of my shoes with. I wanted to scrub the grime of every dark alley and cluttered gutter of the city with his face. I blamed every pseudo-liberal politician who promised social reform and only changed taxes so that everyone got equally swindled and every conservative that kept its plan of action secret and went around kissing babies and offering tax cuts to seniors to buy votes. You never see a politician on the streets, doing groceries, or riding public transit. You never see them living with the rest of their country—not without a suited up fleet of security.

I wondered why society ever did away with public humiliation and shaming rituals. I wanted to lock this swine in the stocks and write “Nazi Filth” on his forehead with indelible ink – maybe dress up some politicians in clown costumes and chain them to security camera polls. Let the general public deal with them, I thought. “Here is your viral Swine pandemic! Let loose your rotten vegetables and tell them how you feel,” I’d tell them.

Despite my disgust and rejection, I knew I couldn’t do much as one. I resorted to the only device of protest I had left available to me. I fell into zen silence and blocked him out. With no reactions on my end, he had nothing left to throw my way. He muttered to himself in incomprehensible tongues until the worm screamed to another halt. It was our stop. My girlfriend and I got up to leave, and I was happy this dumb animal stayed put.

The train doors shut behind us and we were safe, but the scum was still out there: a grimy stain was zooming through the city’s underside. It was too big for one person to handle, but at the same time apparently too small to receive appropriate attention.


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Now playing: Gallows - Crucifucks

2009, Where Is Your Music?

Today I shelved my editions of Fung Yu-Lan's A Short History of Chinese Philosophy and Wing-Tsit Chan's A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy in a bout of rejection against filial and traditional practice, restraint and lionization.

A familiar pastime to be included as one of my notorious procrastination routines, I sat myself in front of my laptop and sought out my bookmark for the Exclaim Magazine website, plotting to spend the next half hour lurking bands that were slated for upcoming album releases. I was hoping for something fresh that was wholesome, but that also retained what I call necessary contempt for modern maxims. Call me elitist, but without that loathing, music just feels empty and phlegmatic to me - like ignorant bliss.

Exclaim Magazine is a good place to go if you're harbouring a canker of time-killing indulgence in your cheek; its lists of new music releases seem limitless.

However, I scrolled through this list, searching about every other artist I'd never investigated on myspace with hopes of getting a taste of the sound they'd be making available on their respected release dates, and I found little I could appreciate. I found a lot of contempt, but where I did, it was like there was too much.

I felt old and jaded and all I wanted was for somebody to put a record on and leave me to some kind of eternal rocking chair where the soundtrack provided could soothe my deep wrinkles with sweet rhetoric and cunning attitude.

All that said, I did manage to stumble upon a fun little oldie.

This Note is Not Legal Tender

I don’t drive, so when it gets to that point in the night where it’s unbearable to stay awake, I often find myself in situations where I’m begging my friends or girlfriend to drive me home. Of course, with those people, it’s hardly begging.

We live in a Weird Time. It brings back memories of Black weekdays, dirty thirties and Boo Radley leaving treasure in an oak tree. I like to think I’m conscious of things like our seemingly swan song singing economy and the overwhelmingly schizophrenic gas prices that roll and reek vengeful havoc on our culture’s (or at least some of its representatives’) ignorant greed. Still, when we’re in a group setting, and one of us suddenly becomes aware of their heavy eyelids, I am more often than not offered a ride home on general principle that I would otherwise have to walk.

In these situations, I am prone to being the only passenger to accompany the driver; at least sometimes I am the last to be dropped off. At that hour of the night, which is usually absurdly late and not night at all, conversation comes slowly to me. And since even at suitable hours I find that I write better words than I can sometimes articulate through speech – I actually come complete with a list of conversation starters that I will fall back on if the occasion necessitates such contrived attempts at communication.

Lately, I’ve been resorting to a question I’ve had about counterfeit money. I do not know as much as I wish I did about legal matters. I am also double-majoring in English and Philosophy, so naturally, the Meaning and Truth of words and how far they can be stretched is of great importance to my curiosity. Recently I’ve been asking my drivers and sometimes even fellow passengers what “counterfeit” means to them. Is it having it (knowingly?)? using it (knowingly?)? making it? all of the above? I received responses that perpetuated opinions in favour of all the options listed, but the “knowingly” element made its first appearance on my ride home last night.

As I mentioned before, we live in Weird Times. In this fertile and vulnerable New Year, 2009, history seems to be repeating itself as history is wont to do, and our economy is in a state of Recession. Well, Weird Times call for Weird Answers. I like to think I’ve learned from the best. My personal library consists of enough Beat writers and artists to blow up a bank. That claim might seem strange, but it will become less obscure as I go on.

Between the end of the Great Depression and the 50s, there wasn’t much room for fun. With World War II in full heat for the first half of the forties, soldiers were recruited in large quantities, diminishing the definition of entertainment for stay-at-homers to satisfying vicarious interest. Even after the official end of WWII on September 2, 1945, culture was licking its wounds in America: the focus shifted to repopulation and family unification. When the fifties started, Conservative philosophy dominated how people lived their lives, and if you were an individual that wasn’t baby booming and pursuing nuclear family life or the great American Dream, you had nothing but your job and your possessions, and you weren’t looked on kindly.

Then came the Beat Generation.

The Beat Generation consisted of a collection of authors that can be looked at as a response to the Great Depression and its results. “Beats” or “Beatniks” were essentially those that rejected the dominant American values, seeking liberation for the very soul that was being oppressed. Eastern spirituality, drug use, and sexual exploration were prominent focuses. Jack Kerouac packed up and traveled across America, traveling which consisted of hitchhiking and finding beauty on the road and in the jazz clubs and company it brought him to. This resulted in the 1957 publication of On the Road. William S. Burroughs embraced drugs like marijuana, a German opioid called Eukodol, morphine, and especially, heroin, all of which he wrote about in his seminal work, Naked Lunch. In an effort of spiritual independence, in 1955 Allen Ginsberg took advice from his therapist and quit his job, becoming a full-time poet. He then wrote Howl, a collection of his then-recent works. He was able to do this with the time he had off and the stress that was lifted when he quit his job.

The things you own end up owning you, but you are the only owner of your experiences. An important element of Kerouac’s travels and the junky lifestyle that Burroughs passed was a rejection of material possessions. It’s hard to travel with a lot of stuff – especially when on foot, and drugs cost money – something a lot of heavy users (Burroughs was one) often have to obtain by letting things go. There’s something to be said here, since both were able to make books of substantial integrity out of the experiences in which they took part.

Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Ginsberg’s Howl each faced obscenity charges thanks to the conservative values being enforced at the time, but ultimately, they were lifted for the social importance that each work brought to its culture. If Burroughs and Ginsberg proved anything more than Jack Kerouac with these triumphs it was that it is okay to be obscene.

This is where my counterfeiting question comes in. But I’ll reintroduce it in a new way: if counterfeiting is illegal, would it be illegal for art’s sake? Even if it is, and the Recession becomes the New Depression, I wouldn’t mind doing some of my own for the purpose of making a 150x70m collage of colourful Canadian capital that spells out in big blocky capitals,

THIS NOTE IS NOT LEGAL TENDER.

It might be rejected as counterfeit and obscene, but I think it would serve a greater purpose than imposing a widespread conservative repulse in a time of economic strife. It would deliver an important message to the Canadian people: in this time of capitalist propaganda and rickety job stability, you still have your souls. Make art, and live life. Enjoy freedom from and reject the noose of material thingamajigs. This is the new Pop Art. It’s not Pop Art at all. It’s something from nothing. It’s Beatific. It’s obscene. It’s Soul Art.

Dig?



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Now playing: Deftones - Passenger