PASS THE TEA

Every day something ridiculous happens.

We react, and we chatter about it over coffee and we declare the world gone mad and we make dinner and watch Seinfeld re-runs and forget about it.

Then the next day, something even more outrageous happens.

And we recoil in horror, declaim solemnly over coffee and declare Life as a constant re-enactment of Alice's Mad Tea Party, make dinner, watch Seinfeld and so on.

But then there was yesterday.

A headline so lunatic, so twisted, so incomprehensible, we knew with certainty that The End Is Upon Us.

Here it is:

Condo building protested as threat to ‘drug market’ 

Pardon me while I laugh hysterically just to clear my nostrils.

OK.

Now the piece in the Globe informs us that someone wants to build some housing downtown. Pretty good stuff so far, Yes.

 

But soft, forsooth!

 

This proposed project happens to be across the street from Vancouver's single greatest cultural contribution to the world - our famous "safe" injection office, the ironically named, Insite.

 

Now you need to know that there exists in this community a non-profit society which goes by the handle VANDU. Or Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. This is a group of active heroin users who not only believe that they have the well-born Charter right to do nothing all day but steal money and property from taxpayers so that they can use heroin, but who have so successfully convinced the wooly-headed at Vancouver City Council and the Province of BC of this right, that these austere and wise bodies annually give these suffering addicts hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars to pursue this right.

 

But I can tell you are now way ahead of this story.

 

VANDU doesn't want a fancy gussied up living place across from their free shooting place because - are you sitting down? - gentrification will upset the drug market!!!

 

Bad condo people. Bad investors in housing. Bad planners.

 

How dare you interrupt the flow of poison in our streets just to give people a place to live? Where are your values?

 

Coffee and dinner and Seinfeld re-runs may not suffice today. 

 

I may have to drink whiskey or shoot heroin or sniff cocaine to absorb this one.

 

Who needs the PNE?

I live in Vancouver. I live in a city in which one is privileged to spend every day on a circus ride, upside down and careening to the next candy-flossed madhouse distraction.