the slowpokes and the pompous

I suspect that a lot of what I write here may not make a lot of sense, n'or even seem contextual. I tend to think in very broad swathes, and pick up little pieces of information, and junk thought, and imagery, and so on, and try to build a diorama of sorts to understand the world at large. This is a part of trying to understand myself, and my own place in the big picture. Writing is a kind of leavening of all that disparate noise for my own understanding. Ultimately, it is a kind of Unified Theory, and as such, the ideas are ephemeral, and building of that understanding is very slow going.

It is something that I think that we all do, on different levels, and in different ways. How can the RE market reach such unbelievable levels of stupidity? What is really behind it all? How do we end up with the governments that we end up with - who implement legislations so contrary to what we, the people, are really aiming for? Why do people prefer granite countertops and stainless steel appliances? What makes people think that Vancouver is the Best Place on Earth(TM)?

I think that maybe people want Vancouver to be the Best Place on Earth, because they came here, and would not want to think that they had made a mistake. Maybe that is where all the comparisons to NYC, London, Paris, etc., come in. But we are none of that, and ironically, we have destroyed the Vancouver that we loved when we came here. High class in borrowed shoes, but still an unsophisticated street urchin. It amuses me to read on some fora the views of the newly escaped from the Big Smoke called Torrono, who want to turn Vancouver into the very thing that they have fled. Handles like "The604", and such, bely the origins of their holders. As do their writings.

Kevin Potvin, over at The Republic of East Vancouver, posited that;

We tend to think here, in chronically self-congratulating Vancouver, that everyone who comes here was motivated to come to this place rather than to go away from another place. The truth is Vancouver is a refugee camp for dissociated, abused, and discarded people from all over Canada

, and being one of those "dissociated, abused, and discarded people" myself, I would tend to agree somewhat. I never really had an interest in Vancouver until I came for a two week sojourn in 1988, and once here, I liked what I found, and never left. That was 20 years ago though, and that Vancouver is gone. Now, the "dissociated, abused, and discarded people", are looking to Grand Forks, Castlegar, Roberts Creek, etc., for what they once found here.

I lifted the above image from here, because it just seemed so pertinent. The Cafe Pompous - situated at the corner of Malaise and Ennui - where the observation is: Everything is so banal. It makes my lack of context somehow...contextual.

I also just had to lift this quote from the same place:

The name “Slowpoke” comes from an appreciation of the need to slow down to appreciate life. Slowpokes, according to the author, “value quality over quickness” and so don’t always fit into the modern world. The four-panel strips elaborate on that theme, whether presenting personal character insights or larger cultural commentary.

I would have approved more of a quality evolution of Vancouver over a quick one, myself.