Balancing necessity and desire, the crux of the human experience, felt ever more keenly by a demographic which Herman Hesse and Stephanie Meyer turn the biggest profit on.
To wash clothes, or mingle with throngs of mulleted Canada Day revelers? To tune up bikes or enter Balenciaga for a fleeting moment, until the clerk boots the riff raff?
The Middle Way beckons, like the thin painted line between the roadway and shoulder that if you ride just right, confers speed and the texture of velodrome. It’s tough to ride that line, but we’re doing it. Having lots of gelato and burning it off. Inhaling high dollar wontons with wanton abandon, converting it to muscle and tendon. We’re seeing slices of life, blue collar, white collar, black market, fish market…
We’re hitting deadlines after leaving everything to the last minute. Learning to figure some things out instead of asking. Asking, too, instead of staying quiet. To swim in ambiguity, and to create meaning from an open ended day.
Some took the train to Chinatown, observing characters Michelangelo might sketch. Others browsed the sprawling University of British Columbia. Perhaps a future home.
There is no right way to spend an afternoon in a new place. What matters, beyond Maslow’s hierarchy, is that contour is applied to the topography of memory, so that it may make for a pleasant ride when one cycles through it at a future time. Did you like the architecture? Will you remember the conversation with that caricature of a human on the metro? Can you believe they have Ketchup flavored chips, and only stock two kinds of Cheez-It? Three decades on, these little snack cracker-sized memories may come in handy.
We drift off in our bunks, digesting the day, defragging the mental hard drive, codifying rhythm of Vancouver in the subconscious piano roll. Tomorrow, we roll on to the tune of Victoria. A bunch of Vict-rollas.
