BC is insane sometimes, Volume II

Scanning the headlines was kind of a mind-blowing experience for me this morning. There are times here when I have to stop and wonder whether these sorts of things only happen out here, or whether I was just studiously oblivious when I lived in Ontario. It’s really a toss up between the two. I can’t remember if I was oblivious – which is probably a good indicator of the fact that I was.

However, when was the last time someone BLEW UP a store front in Toronto?

It’s not only that either. It’s that this city seems to have such periods of relative calm, and then all of a sudden people get shot in restaurants, blow up restaurants, and climb telephone poles.

Maybe I’m totally out to lunch, but let’s just review shall we?

Wednesday morning it took me nearly an hour to get to work because all the buses had been rerouted around the site of where, at 3 am, someone had blown up a Taco joint on Broadway, taking the Starbucks beside it along for the ride, and blowing the windows out of the London Drugs across the street (which, incidentally, opened for business as usual, missing panes, debris and all).

This morning my buses suck again. The reason this time? Some guy climbed a telephone pole downtown and was threatening to throw himself on the cables for the streetcars. And not only that, but there are three armed police officers on the bus I take over the bridge, one standing at each door, complete with earpieces snaking out of their collars. Awesome.

In honour of Valentine’s Day, a thief clears out the ENTIRE STOCK of a florist in South Vancouver. What do you do with an entire store’s worth of cut flowers? Besides having a brand new dumpster full of rotting vegetation…

Finally, and this is what really drove me to post today, a SEVERED RIGHT FOOT, still in its running shoe, washed up on one of the Gulf Islands today. That’s alarming enough, but the really jaw-dropping bit about this story is that today’s foot is actually the THIRD of its kind in the last six months.

What struck me as a little macabre-ly funny about this is that living in this province has seriously reduced my shockability. You not only get the bizarre blend of backwoods, urban, yuppie, hippy, (this province henceforth to be known as the Bourbon Yippy! of Canada); you also sometimes open the newspaper, see the headline “Severed Foot Found on Shore of Gulf Island,” and think “Oh my God! …. Again?”