What is your price?

I have written here previously about my take on civil society, and the negative changes that I see at the individual, and urban, levels. And I’m off on that tangent again this evening.

Imagine yourself as a graduate student at a respectable university, married (or at the very least living with someone), a two year old child, marginal funds, and a need (real or imagined) for a new computer.

Got that firmly fixed in your mind?

Now consider your priorities. Rent. Food. Tuition (probably fully funded as a PhD candidate). Bills. Computer.

The computer comes in last, at least in the model I’m presenting here, because in reality most of us can live with an out-moded piece of junk for just a little while longer.

One day, while talking to a colleague, or a friend, or some guy in a bar, you hear that you can get a brand new machine for half price. In the original box, with all the original documentation, the whole nine yards.

What do you do?

Do you assume that there must be something wrong with this proposal, and walk away, your wallet firmly under control?

Or do you hesitate momentarily – knowing there is something wrong – but somehow start to weigh your needs (and God knows you need that new computer) and determine that you’re interested in the possibility of saving some money?

You get a phone number. You call, nervous. The guy on the other end is very reassuring, he can get you what you want, lets say for half price.

Damn. A new MacBook Pro is way out of reach. But only half price. And in the original box.

Yes! I’ll take it. When can I get it?

Tomorrow. The coffee shop in the village. Cash.

And that’s where I come in to the story.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop in the village.

The guys with the laptop show up, coffee cups from some other caffeine dealer prominent in their hands, staking out a couple chairs on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop where I sit. Attitude flows off these guys like water, and surrounds them, a moat.

But it also hems them in, it identifies them as people of interest, to people like me.

And then the graduate student shows up. On a bicycle. A ladies bicycle. With a toddler.

They exchange pleasantries, he shows the wad of hundreds to prove he is actually going to put out. They, well one of them, produces the brand new laptop. “The box is factory sealed, everything is inside” he says.

“I have to get a coffee, I’ve never done this before,’ and he goes to buy his alibi.

There is an exchange of money.

The two younger guys leave.

The graduate student opens the box to look at his new toy, his daughter momentarily otherwise occupied. “We have to go home now.” And he tries, with difficulty, to load his daughter, and his new computer (with everything in the box) on to his (actually his wife’s) bicycle.

But the store where this computer came from always puts tamper-proof tape on boxes. It’s yellow, as I recall. And it was not on this box.

Now there are a couple scenarios that are possible. One is that the two guys are students at the university just down the street, and that they bought the lovely new bauble at the student price, re-selling it for half the difference between the regular, academic, price and the ’street price’ of the new MacBook Pro. And that would mean that my ‘graduate student’ is not a graduate student, or he could have got the machine for the academic price. The second, and more distasteful possibility is that the two guys stole the laptop, or recieved it from someone who stole it (probably ‘to order’), and moved it the the guy that bought it.

Not being privy to the exact amount of cash handed over (though it was all hundred dollar bills as far as I could tell) it is very difficult to determine which of the two possibilities it may have been.

But it raises several, serious, questions. But the one that interests me, is what was the guy’s price? His ‘price,’ is the difference between the legitimate, legal, price and what he paid.

For this argument let’s say he paid 50% of list, which as I understand, is high – even for ‘to order’ thievery. That makes his ‘price’ 50% of list. He is prepared to, essentially, be a thief for 50% of the list on that laptop.

He is prepared to countenance theft, albeit someone else’s actions, to save himself a few hundred – perhaps a thousand – dollars. The actual amount is dependent on the legitimate sale price of the laptop, and is nearly irrelevant, because it is his willingness to collude that primarily bothers me.

For a few hundred dollars, give or take a bit, this guy is prepared to be a thief. That few hundred dollars is his price, and now that we know his price, we know him.

I have spent enough years in, and around, the university campus to have a fairly good handle on ‘who’s who,’ educated guesses based on age, marital status (including evidence of children, and their ages), mode of ‘appropriate’ transport, a gaggle of little clues that indicate whether I am about to lip off to a professor, or a donut-eating, Segway-riding, campus security goof. And, by extension, what graduate students and, (God-forbid) junior faculty look and act like. This guy is right in there. The wife’s bicycle doesn’t scream money, no suspension forks here, nope. The baby-seat is still in good enough shape to be on the first kid. And he rode to the coffee shop in the village, along with child, knowing that he would be lugging his nice new computer home – so he doesn’t live very far away.

Very few tenured faculty either have kids in baby seats, or live quite that close to the coffee shop. Yes, some do one or the other. Not many do both.

So, in one afternoon, I find a thief. So what?

I am not one to point the finger, wagging it in your face, and hypocritically asking that you behave – all the time – in ways I have not always behaved.

What I am asking, I suppose, is what next? And why, and who, and where?

If thieving the laptop is ok, at least today, what is ok tomorrow? Can we steal a co-workers paycheque; we can surely use the same arguments to justify that action that this guy used on himself, I need the money (or the cash saved, amounts to the same thing) more than my co-worker.

What about our (rather than his) obligations to society? Do I report him? Do I positively identify one, or both, of the two guys who ’supplied’ the computer? What about you? Will you rat out one of your fellow grad students, the guy with a wife and kid, who just got a killer deal on a new MacBook Pro?

I did. And I’ll hear from the store security, looking for more details, for times, and places, and descriptions. They’ll ask, unsure, whether I’ll ‘co-operate with the police?’ I will.

Because I know my price.

What is your price?

iStuff

Well, it may be a tiny bit premature, but it appears my Macintosh i-Book has collapsed in a wiggling heap. With the proliferation of ‘i’ labelled product, will I be having an ‘i-Funeral’ for my laptop, followed by an ‘iWake,’ where people pine for the days of OS 8.6?

I tried to circumvent the problem, buying a new iMac (one of the new Intel chip machines), hoping that the gods would laugh at my feeble attempts to out-fox them, all the problems on my laptop vanishing once the new machine was plugged in to replace the old.

Waste of time.  This evening the i-Book refused to fire up at all. No amount of manipulation seems to make any difference whatever; all those cryptic key combinations made no diference at all, keyboard gymnastics can now go by the wayside.  And then I get the e-mail reply (on a Windows box no less) from the service technician, suggesting that he can order parts, on two or three day turnaround, to fix the old beater.

I replied, with a further description of problems as they developed, with the vaguest hope that the thing is, like the ’six million dollar man,’ rebuildable.

Well, the next week will tell.

And, as it develops, more information on my prospective Masters thesis. Most of what goes up here, at least with respect to my thesis, is a form of talking out loud . And I’m hoping that any of you reading will offer constructive critiques…

Remember that ‘u’ key?

Hey, remember that ‘u’ key that didn’t work, mentioned in the last post? Well, now the entire computer is a bit suspect.

I have now been fighting with my laptop for 5 days. Re-install system software. Nope. Buy over-priced anti-virus software (which won’t boot from the disk, seems awfully stupid to me, means any ‘real’ viral writer worth her salt should be able to defeat that problem) to no avail. Now the CD drive assumes there is a CD, actually two or three CDs, that need to be ejected during booting…

All very confusticating…

If you haven’t seen ‘Cars,’ the animated flick, do so. It’s not ‘about’ cars, its about people and their relations to stuff, to culture (including ‘car’ culture), ethnicity (and there are a couple REALLY good jabs there), change, memory, all the elements of good story telling are addressed!

And, stay for the credits. Not only out of respect for the minions that toil in obscurity,  but because there is some really funny stuff going on there.

I’m keeping this post short, ’cause I have no idea when this thing will decide to crash again, and it crashes in the cutest possible ‘Macintosh’ way – the SBBOD (the ’spinning beach ball of death’ to the uninitiated) just spontaneously appears. And never leaves until I pull the plug. But it’s a cute little beach ball. And, I guess, it beats the ‘chimes of doom,’ a sound few Mac users have ever actually suffered.

I’m struggling with my Masters proposal (Masters in Urban Studies) in part because I have take 4 of the 6 courses and registered in number 5 for this coming September, which would leave one more ‘elective,’ and the thesis work which is spread over two course numbers in this program. Part of the difficulty is that getting to grips with my thesis isn’t going to happen until next Spring (2007) as the end of my last elective draws near. The other reason is that the Program wants everyone to elect their thesis supervisor by July 10, 2006. That’s right, last week.

But we got an extension.

I sent program secretary a note, suggesting that the requirement applied to people who ‘knew’ what their thesis subject was? ‘No, the requirement applies to everyone, even those who do not know the subject of their thesis.’

So, that ties this post to the ‘urban,’ insofar as my Masters in Urban Studies is concerned.

Pick a supervisor before you know the subject, eh?

But, it is a lovely, sunny, Sunday. And I’m off for a urban exploration, an ‘expotition’ if you are a fan of the philosopher bear, Winnie-the-Pooh.

More later.

On a more positive note

On a more positive note…

It’s Wednesday. Nothing very much out of the ordinary, just a Wednesday stuck in the middle of the week, flanked on either side by ‘days of the week.’ Quotidian, somewhat tedious, and nothing very special.

But I had a couple things happen today that are out of the ordinary, things notable for their specific implications in my life.

Ever try to type on a keyboard where the ‘u’ doesn’t really work? But that is only a digression.

The “Cottage’ is a little place in Gastown (Vancouver’s earliest surviving street grid and architecture is here) that serves a fantastic clubhouse sandwich – no fries, a couple slices of good dill pickle, and real turkey. Bacon, veggies, and made-to-order service round it out.

There is nothing fancy or up-scale here, not the food, not the owner, not the staff, and certainly not the ratty old carpet. But the owner, Carlos, is always happy to see me. The coffee is always fresh – or they make me an Americano, no extra charge. The staff, that would be Peter, are just as outgoing as the boss (and always ready to have a laugh at the absent boss’s expense) is.

And the smell is heavenly. The upstairs seating area has the ‘million dollar view’ of Vancouver’s still-working harbour. Seaplanes, mostly DeHavilland Beavers and Twin Otters do their scheduled runs all day, a lovely heterodyning of twin-turbines and Wasp Jr radials. The heliport sits directly opposite the café windows, and a variety of commercial choppers, scheduled and charter come and go.

Freighters come into port, freighters leave. Cruise ships act as greyhounds, dropping one load of passengers in the morning, sailing out-bound again often within 24 hours. Harbour tugs, fish boats (for the few fish they haven’t already snagged), the transit service ferries Burrard Beaver and Burrard Otter complete their 16 minute passages between Vancouver and North Vancouver dozens of times a day.

Trains. SD-40s and GP-38s service the rail yards. The crashing and banging as trains are made up; sending Chinese running shoes to Montreal, Korean white-goods to Kenora, and leaving the odd detritus in Vancouver. As a token of good will I suppose. Grain goes out. Coal, sulfur, and goods (I hope) all leave, though not necessarily from below my café vantage point – though all within view.

One of Vancouver’s multiple container terminals runs its huge, mantis-like, container cranes day and night. Well, it’s day and night when there is a ship to unload – but there are days when there are no ships at ‘my’ terminal – and then the delicate dance of wires is stilled, the marionette abandoned by the master’s hand.

And I had lunch with a friend. An architect. Retired, mostly. And one of the very few ‘professionals’ in my select circle of friends.

One doesn’t want to reveal too much here; the sensibilities and sensitivities of friends must be considered, and if not known, then decorum makes its own, specific, demands.

But lunch was a delight. He brought good news relative to his own work, writing as well as architecture. And we discussed some of the work I am currently engaged in, again, some of it real, physically tangible work, and some of it writing. My current ‘day’ job offers much, but perhaps oddly, demands a certain reticence on my part – there are the institutional, policy, and personal requirements for privacy and discretion – at least as long as I am swinging a screw-gun on contract.

I shared some of my mood, evident in the last post here a few days ago, and of which my friend is familiar. And, the fact that I could handle having lunch with him meant that I was in considerably better shape mentally than a few days ago. Though Churchill’s ‘black dogs’ still gnaw at my legs.

That lunch was the first part of the day that I wanted to write about.

The second part, and one more ‘urban’ oriented, was a walk this evening.

After a light dinner in Chinatown with another friend I headed off home, fully intending to sit and read ‘Nothing if not Critical’ by the Australian art critic, and long-time writer for Time Magazine, Robert Hughes. He may be, or may not be, an irritating and obnoxious drunk, but he can write right about art. And write with spirit, sensibility, insight, and a refreshing lack of cant and obscurantist theory. And I was going to read some more of him this evening.

But I went for a walk instead. My regular walking routes all take me east, or south, to start. And that means out of the downtown core, and into what would originally have been streetcar suburbs. This evening however I turned west, and headed for Stanley Park. While the 400 hectares (1000 acres) is all second-growth forest, and unbelievably heavily ‘tended,’ the park is an urban gem.

Taking the seawall route that describes the outer perimeter of the park re-exposes me to the city I live in, and many of my reasons for loving cities in their near-infinite variety.

Entering the park proper I’m greeted by the raucous verbiage of a great blue heron, sqruonk, sqruonk, sqruonk. And the troubled, and troubling, looks on the faces of rowers new to the coxed eight. And yachts, large and small, in reality, and in name only. The ‘nine-o’clock gun,’ which is a 16 lb cannon, cast in the early 19th century, that goes off at 9 PM (more or less) every night.

The tide is flowing, probably about 5 knots off Prospect Point, and in a back-eddy I  catch a glimpse of a harbour seal just checking out the human world. My walk takes me past memorabilia, past bits of litter lost in the wind. Lovers, walking hand in hand, and in just about every variety they all look like lovers, walking hand in hand.

Freighters come through the First Narrows as the tide starts to slow, the inner harbour nearly full. Charter cruise boats, hoping to pay their fuel bill off the customer’s bar tab, slowly edge their way out under the bridge, and like a reluctant swimmer, dip their bows into English Bay.

Another seal, and Siwash Rock. And more lovers, some all alone, run, or walk, or rollerblade by. And I watch. I eavesdrop on private conversations. I make elaborate stories to surround the bits of conversational dross I have picked up. Stories. But they are all stories without beginning, they are without end, they really have no lives of their own. But it allows me to engage in the lives of the protagonists without ever meeting them, without liking or disliking them, without ever knowing anything about them. Except that little bit they let slip.

And then, almost 9 km after I started walking around the park, I’m out of it again. And then home.

But, one thing before I leave. I look at all those cruise ships, mostly heading to Alaska, all summer out of Vancouver. Are they, in any sense, floating cities? And, if they are, are they the penultimate gated community? Second only to whatever Heaven, or variant thereof, that one’s faith promises? And if they are cities, in much the same way that Celebration, Florida, is a city, do they represent some fascist architect’s dream realized?

Just a thought, comments always welcome.

I went to post this last night, it is now Thursday morning, and my computer decided in its infinite silicon wisdom, to freeze. An hour and a half of fighting to no avail and I went to bed. This morning, for reasons completely unknown to me, everything seems to work just fine.

Condenser of loneliness

Condenser of loneliness

I’ve been away for a while – lost in swampy mess of depression, trying to find my way out, while presenting an artificially constructed presence to those around me.

My social skills essentially evaporate, my tolerance for other people is diminished, and my patience for their attitudes and activities rapidly shrinks to near zero. Just finding the mental space to write indicates some form of return to normalcy, and welcome it is.

While out on my own as it were, I am fortunate in being able to ‘fake’ engagement with my fellow citizenry, often amazing my self in the fluidity and competence with which I pull off a fraudulent engagement. Almost like serial marriage.

The obverse of this situation however is a grim and dismal examination of the society in which I find myself. I watch, critique, and criticize those people, events, and social realities that exist for those who will see them.

The breakdown of the vaunted Canadian ‘social contract’ is vividly displayed in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side; human misery openly displayed, the mentally ill and physically handicapped left to fend for themselves. The drug dealers, which no one will openly proclaim to be illegal immigrants from Central America seem to have an unnatural affinity for an ethnic food restaurant in the neighbourhood.

The open dealing of drugs must be countenanced by police and politicians – they certainly do nothing to curtail the open flaunting of the law. While the Supreme Court of Canada worries its tiny minds over whether a certain act on the part of police will bring “the law into disrepute;” I can only surmise that the top jurists in Canada have never actually had to live within this tangled morass called the Downtown East Side, nor have they actually ever had their comfortable middle-class lives challenged by the authority of the drug dealers to enforce territorial claims. And the Vancouver
City police seem happy enough in their own tiny little boxes, living in Delta, or Surrey, anywhere but my neighbourhood.

But the police seem to miss a vast array of other events, all part of collapse of the social contract.

They miss the four cars parked on Wall St, in Vancouver’s Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood, that all carry Alberta license plates. And they have all had Alberta plates for years. They also seem to miss the unlicensed, 36-foot, motor home. I guess because it is parked on the sidewalk it isn’t their ‘beat’ so to speak.

Then again, I’m not sure what the police actually consider to be ‘their’ beat. They seem to miss, again and again, the guy on Wall St (the house directly across from the ‘solo’ tree in the park, where stolen goods get stashed, to be retrieved by the guy in the house. Again, and again, and again.

But this is a middle-class community, and everyone knows that members of the middle-class don’t do anything illegal. And they certainly seem to be willfully blind to what their neighbour does on Wall St.

And, as I walk my routes through the messier parts of the city I see other, even more disturbing, evidence of the collapsing social contract Canadians have had for the last couple generations.

There have ‘always’ been working girls, members of the world’s oldest profession, even if some of them masqueraded as members of genteel society in Victorian English novels – hidden in plain sight, they were trying to ‘marry up,’ though one had to be careful not to be entirely too forthright about the process. But today’s street workers are never going to ‘marry up,’ if they marry at all. And I’m not all that convinced that marrying is all that good a deal at the best of times. But that is probably not half as important to these women as getting another fix, another hit, another trick, and a long way down the list, another meal.

In the last few months I have noticed something I never saw before; something that may have existed, out of sight, out of mind, out of my mind at least. Groups of women, usually two, three, or four, huddled around some temporary shelter – a reminder of how close Vancouver’s homeless are to the residents of favelas or barrios the world over. And, almost always there is one guy, just one lone male.

Is it easier to huddle together, out of society’s sight, with some lone male to offer some supposed security, than it is to maintain the façade of normalcy?

What does society owe these women? Does it owe them decent housing, a sense of self-respect, God-forbid perhaps it owes them the ability to ply their trade in peace and quiet. If only this peace and quiet would include the sense of safety that the crème de la crème deserve in Vancouver, and the sense of privilege that the crème claim as a matter of course.

There is no one sleeping in the doorways of businesses on Vancouver’s ‘West Side,’ the good citizens of Point Grey don’t go to sleep at night with the homeless camped (or passed out) in their ‘upper 10th Ave.’ doorways. God, the Mayor (“better a cripple than a woman” a woman said with some scorn) would be all over the police force if such a transgression were to slip past the donut-eaters on patrol.

But, if you live in the Downtown East Side, the police (who, remember don’t live anywhere near the area) just shrug.

So, about that contract, eh?

It seems the contract, fraying a bit at the edges, only applies to the rich (the modestly middle-class can go fuck themselves, they can’t buy enough influence at City Hall). It seems the middle-class, essentially a creation of the post-war economic situation moderated by a grim remembrance of the Depression, is nearing its own end, sliding in to irrelevance nearly as fast as the urban poor.

It also appears that Vancouver’s police have once again become virtually unanswerable to the vast electorate, who, in return, view the police with ill-concealed distaste, remarkably resembling something you might have stepped in.

And, watching the performance of police, it doesn’t take long to realize that they are solely interested in defending their own tiny bit of turf. I don’t see any action at all on the drug dealers, most of whom have been standing at the corner of Hastings and Columbia for years. And, interestingly, both the police and the dealers enjoy the Mexican food on Cordova St. So they can’t say they haven’t seen one another around.

The Canadian federal government seems unwilling, unable, or impotent when considering what do, broadly speaking, about a variety of ills. The last minority government, formed by the Liberal Party of Canada, was headed by a guy whose riches were protected in offshore havens. The current minority government, headed by the Conservative Party (they dropped the ‘Progressive’ part of ‘Progressive Conservative’) is run by Stephen Harper, a cloned albino spawn of the Fraser Institute, our very own home-grown right-wing think-tank bunch of self-righteous neo-conservatives.

Neither the last Government, nor this one, seems prepared to ‘just’ legalize illegal drugs. Tell the police to go to hell. Tell the trial lawyer’s association to go to hell. Legalize dope. Take the money so saved, probably billions of dollars in policing, prosecution, incarceration and spend a tiny fraction of it on dope. Give the dope away, for free, trading it for a fingerprint.

And make dealing dope so prohibitively expensive that no one even thinks of bootlegging it – and for those who do give free enterprise a shot, put them in the joint (jail, eh) until Hell freezes over.

Addicts know what they are getting. Ambulance crews know, with some assurance, what the ‘subject’ of their call may have ingested. The hospital has a fighting chance of countering intentional overdoses – if we decide that intentional overdoses are something we want to counter.

The dealers are out of a job. The theft of anything that can be sold for $5 will drop. The cost of doing ‘business’ will plummet for a vast array of small, and large, businesses that currently lose huge sums of money to small-scale theft and pilferage to shoplifters and smash-and-grab theft. The auto-glass business will, unfortunately, suffer as cars get broken into far less frequently, the dope being free rather than paid for by grabbing some tourist’s camera out of their car.

And those working girls, huddled under a couple ratty old pallets? Well, the dope is free. If the dope is free the decision whether to turn tricks changes from an imperative, driven by one drug hunger or another, to some other set of decisions.

And, perhaps, with their time freed up a bit, the police would look after the guy on Wall St., and maybe, just maybe, they could turn their attention to the people who exit a parking garage at Cordova and Columbia just after shift changes at, coincidently, the local police station. Just part of the ‘social contract,’ eh?
And, ‘condensor of loneliness’ is from Robert Hughes 1990 ‘Nothing If Not Critical,’ page 229, in reference to cities through history.