An apocalyptic month of Gulag in pictures

A B&B high up the mountain. With a view of CONCRETE.  People pay A LOT for a view of concrete, LOL.

The reason you can see downtown is that it poured last night, which washed the dirt out of the air

Grandma's lawn hadn't been mowed yet this year ;-(

Did someone point out to Canada, which uses its slaughtered youth of two world wars to brainwash its citizens into dreams of glory with the image of poppies, that the choice of flower itself suggests a surreal illusion associated with an opium pipe?

Another Sunny Day (TM) in Vancouver

A temporary home in the B&B

Kookum's son (George's uncle) Brown dies and I'm house-sitting a psychologically deranged (I mean it !) kitten for a week.

Now that it's no longer raining, Vancouver can exhibit another one of its great blessings:  Visible Air.

Also known as car exhaust mixed with other pollutants

There are moments of unexpected beauty:  A fallen poppy petal covered in rain drops, but moments of beauty in Vancouver last about as long as this view

When the air you are looking through obscures the outlines of buildings only about 1 km away, you know there is something wrong.

But isn't it a great thing that cigarette smoking is banned in public parks in this filthy city?

I'm eating at a Viet restaurant on Kingsway and I get a pre-taste of things to come soon.  The daughter of the owner is chatty and the owner and cook actually cares whether I like his Bun Cha ;-)  

Thinking about the reaction of that older Vietnamese man leads my thoughts into a surprising direction:

You know those instances when a waitress in a regular restaurant asks you 3 times how the food is? They're just hoping for a bigger tip. They don't really care.  You're just participating in a well-rehearsed play.  Illusion. Waste of your life.  Go to a restaurant where the cook is the owner and the daughter is the waitress and the illusion vanishes in a second and life becomes real again.   Not a big deal but just a tiny example of how Western society engages in a meaningless dance ritual that only imitates real life.  People perform this dance ritual because everyone else does.  But deep down quite a few people have this particular feeling that tells them in no uncertain terms that their daily ritual is nonsense.  That 'particular feeling' is called depression.

But reality is still out there.  And I'm going to rejoin it in less than two weeks ;-)