2003-10-23

I have nothing for you today. This week has been longer and more painful than a root canal with no anesthetic performed by a one-armed chimpanzee. You may as well stop reading right here, because whatever meagre wit I may have had has been summarily evicted from the barren wasteland that was my mind.

Well, don�t say I didn�t warn you. Uh, OK � last night I went to a photography exhibit put on by friends of friends. The venue was blandly chichi, in typical, ostentatiously trendy Ottawa style: lots of asymmetrical couches, oppressive acid jazz and frigidly beautiful staff. In my grubby jeans and hooded sweater, I huddled in a corner drinking wine and staring longingly at the cheese platter (damn but I miss cow excreta sometimes), hoping I wouldn�t be mistaken for one of the Market�s ubiquitous street urchins in off the street on a hunt for free food. My reverse class snobbery aside, the photos were fab, as were the friends and friends of friends.

Afterwards I was invited to an open mic gig at a tiny pub on Elgin. I stayed long enough for a bracing pint of Guinness, but sadly my worst open-mic-related fears were realized when the first set began with an earnestly-rendered double header of the Eagles. Again my cultural elitism drove me out into the frigid night, and I ended the evening chatting with the clerk at the local Shawarma shop, who was a doctor in Iraq eight months ago, and who now works seventy hours a week shilling falafel to bratty, ungrateful malcontents like me. Funny old thing, life.