verainvancouver@gmail.com

  • COVID Hellscape

    COVID Hellscape

    On a plane in 2022, where I could sit a couple of inches from someone in a sealed tube way up in the sky during a supposedly horror-movie-like sweeping pandemic. That flimsy, dirty mask would allegedly save my life, though. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t affect me as profoundly as it did other people; I never…

  • End-of-year plague

    End-of-year plague

    Just a quick post to let everyone know that, at least in my neck of the woods, there’s a fairly heinous bug going ’round. I somehow picked it up last Sunday–when I felt great and walked around the city, enjoying the weather and plotting out my post about the city-transforming Taylor Swift weekend–because by Monday,…

  • The Ongoing Ennui of Davie Village.

    The Ongoing Ennui of Davie Village.

    The West End of Vancouver isn’t huge at all.  It’s a neighbourhood consisting of a handful of blocks in a grid, the furthest area west of downtown you can go, mere steps from English Bay and Stanley Park.  It is not to be confused with West Vancouver or the West Side of Vancouver, which I…

  • I Know Liberty, And It Is This Caftan.

    I Know Liberty, And It Is This Caftan.

    This wouldn’t even be close to a gunpoint-at-head scenario; it would be sweet relief and freedom. I purchased that caftan–an item of clothing I had never considered owning, never mind wearing, in my entire life–back in the summer of 2020. Along with all of the other atrocities and grotesqueries the world was forced to submit…

  • Wealth and hellness: last part, and then we move on

    Wealth and hellness: last part, and then we move on

    Let’s get it out of the way: yes.  That is a very close-up picture of my right butt cheek, nearly two weeks after it landed with a most painful THWONK onto solid ice.  I tried to make the pic as bruise-centric as possible and not make it–y’know–a gratuitous picture of my ass.  It’s to show…

  • wealth and hellness (second part)

    wealth and hellness (second part)

    I have been keeping a journal (it just sounds more grown-up than “a diary”) since I was thirteen years old and have hung onto every last one of them, so naturally, this means that I have two giant suitcases crammed with various scrawled-in notebooks, ranging from cheap spiral-rings to fancy hardcover composition books I felt…

  • wealth and hellness (first part)

    wealth and hellness (first part)

    While I was briefly recalling COVID the other day, a lot of weird memories came back to me.**  I find this particularly odd, because I didn’t think I really had any memories of that first year and a half (March 2020 – fall 2021, the latter time being when I made some major adjustments to…

  • pearson airport barbarism: let’s just conclude this

    pearson airport barbarism: let’s just conclude this

    PRE-READING NOTE: This final entry has taken as much overdramatic, literary, morose license as the author saw fit.  However, no hyperbole was involved in the following account, because absolutely none was required.   So once the swab had circled the inside of both my nostrils and was packed neatly into a plastic baggie with my personal…

  • snowmen and airports

    snowmen and airports

    Mother Nature sure didn’t disappoint.   Went to bed last night and the city was bare; woke up earlier than usual to find everything covered in a fluffy, pristine, thick layer of snow.  There is honestly something magical when this happens, especially when it’s relatively new for your Pacific Northwest winter experiences.  I suppose this is…