My favourite day of the whole summer.

I did.  I absolutely gave it the old SFU try.  I documented it in this blog post, where I managed to somehow pull myself up and out of the summertime blues–blues?  More like suicidal despair–and do my damndest to embrace it.  Morning Seawall walks!  Amusing public art!  Meditations!  Affirmations!  Informative podcasts regarding health and wellness!  Beach visits!  Admiring the lush community gardens and breathing in the scent of Okanagan fruit at Kin’s Farm Market!  Rhapsodizing over the absolutely crazed overgrowth of algae at Lost Lagoon!

Looks like you could almost stand on it.

And then two weeks ago, it all collapsed.  My mental health began to sink, as it always does during this time of year, and a sense of complete hopelessness, apathy, and emotional entropy overwhelmed me and coloured my days. Despite being back in counseling again, despite having some group therapy available to me, despite doing my absolute damndest to get my mind and priorities in order and focus on those, I did not last in my heroic attempts at accepting July and August.  

Therefore, summer in Vancouver can once again get fucked.  

I’ve already written at length about why I absolutely despise summer so I’m not going to go through the list again in detail, save for one item I mentioned: the nonstop, ongoing, relentless, unavoidable, torture-chamber-tier, sleep-depriving, day-extending noise.  Everywhere.  Right from the crack of dawn (literally) until late at night, sometimes right through the night.  Swirling around my apartment building and blasting into my suite because I have to have my balcony door open all the time in order to not melt into a greasy stain. 

No, I don’t have AC.  I live in a 1960s walkup in what is supposed to be a temperate rain forest.  What’s this AC you seem to think everyone has?  Yes, I was gifted a portable machine last year, which I haven’t hooked up, because the thought of what it’s going to do to my electricity bill makes my buttocks cramp.  

Combined with the oppressive and inescapable heat, the shuffling hordes of tourists clogging every last street in  my neighbourhood and downtown, and my own personal and stressful struggles with financial and economic circumstances, this has made me pretty much lose my entire mind.  

It starts before the sun comes up, which is something like six-thirty a.m., when hordes of seagulls begin screaming into the void as they fly around the air, seemingly just beside my building.  Almost immediately afterwards, they are joined by the endless and aggressive crows that set up camp on my street and have been known to ferociously (and painfully!) dive-bomb people’s heads with their claws out if we happen to wander beneath the trees; they caw and bray and croak at top volume alongside their flying scavenger cousins. So we have two avian cacophonies waking me up in a way far worse than an alarm clock, despite my often wearing silicone swimmer’s earplugs to get to sleep.  I can’t quite describe how loud these flying things are, and it seems they have found my particular window and have all decided to swoop and swirl and shriek all around it.  Nowhere else.

Then we have the motorcycles, which I described at length in my post, and whose drivers take great delight during the hot weather in revving the engine and racing down my particular street (my street–actually, my building–is the aural equivalent of a nautical disaster movie, with everything being sucked down the vortex of a sinking ship).  They pick my 30 km/hr little side street, because it’s adjacent to the main drag of Davie, but unlike Davie, has no traffic lights.  You think they drive 30 clicks per hour when there’s no lights and their machine is the closest thing to a large penis they’ll ever have?  Right.  They do this all day, every day, but the best thing is this guy who lives across the street who straddles his cock rocket for about ten minutes every morning (usually 7:15), just revving it before he goes to work or, in my prayers, heads straight off an embankment, but since he was out there this very morning, sadly, hasn’t done so yet.

(As the execrable laughingstock Meghan Markle says, “Believe in the power of yet.”)

Just before Motorcycle Moron puts on his helmet, at 7:00 on the dot are the garbage and recycling trucks.  Once again, I’m baffled as to why they are so ubiquitous during the warm months, and why they spend all morning and afternoon driving around with their contents of fragrant rubbish wafting down the hot streets and alleys.  There are lots of buildings down here, certainly, but the West End doesn’t magically sprout a thousand new apartment buildings during the summer that happen to vanish just as quickly during the autumn.  Their motors are very loud, their beeping hazard lights are aggravating, and their zippy means of picking up metal dumpsters to dispose of the trash means they are just as quick to unceremoniously let go of them, meaning there are startling, unsettling sounds of very heavy metal bins crashing down to the pavement all morning long.  

That’s just the first hour of my day, and how I get to wake up.

Between eight and nine o’clock in the morning, the gardening crews come round, and we get the sounds of lawnmowers and weed-whackers and electric hedge trimmers (I can’t decide which of these is the most heinous), used very slowly by young men and women who want to maximize their time on the clock, despite most of the buildings here having very small patches of lawn and garden.

The real winner in all of this, however, is the construction crew beside me, and who have been here for virtually the entire summer.  Right beside me.  Couldn’t be anyplace else on my street, or in the area.  I described them a few weeks ago as having inexplicably murdered the gorgeous, regal, majestic pine tree in front that was probably a hundred years old, meaning I got a couple of days of chainsaws and wood chippers right outside my window.  When I saw that they had destroyed its sprawling, beautiful, old, living and breathing root system, I actually sobbed a little bit, and rescued the only remnant of that gorgeous tree that was left behind, which was three lone pinecones.  

Then they went and killed all of the vegetation and plant life that was surrounding the building. All of it murdered. I have no idea what the poor tenants are thinking about any of these atrocities.

And since then, they have been paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, I guess, because the entire perimeter of this building’s base has been revamped and turned into concrete.  You know what this involves?

Every manner of chaotic, noise-pollution-causing, sanity-compromising machine, most of which I don’t know the names of, except I think a sandblaster was involved for a solid week.  It is the most heartbreaking thing to have to see, and the most homicide-prompting thing to listen to.  Early in the morning until afternoon.  I even uploaded several seconds of this to YouTube so I could immortalize this hell and share the pain.  It doesn’t stop.  And I can’t work, I can’t write, I can’t do anything except go coconuts in a very real way.  I can’t really go to the library, because it’s a stifling thirty degrees out and means walking straight through downtown, which means thousands and thousands of tourists and kids–as well as the atrocious violent addicts and savages who seem to come out and play on city centre streets during the summer–not to mention the pervasive stench of piss and weed, which are baked into Vancouver when it’s hot.

I’ve had a mental collapse, and the noise is the main part of it.  This is going to get worse with each passing year, and no, I’ve told you, I can’t move anywhere.  I researched the opposite of snowbirding–instead of going someplace warm during the winter, one travels someplace moderate, or even cool, during the summer–and the best I got was Ireland and Scotland.  I’ve got no problems with those places, and may even make some kind of arrangements for next year.    

So there it is, kids.  I made a very noble attempt to lean into this stupid-ass season in the city, and failed.  One can’t say I didn’t try.  I cannot wait for Tuesday, which is when everyone’s back to normal, the tourists have finally evacuated my beloved Seawall, the children and teens are back to school and out of my life, and I can put down the razor blades and vodka.  

Oh, you guys can get lost, too.