Leaving Cirque

It snowed again last night. I awoke to a stunningly beautiful quiet clean urban view but now it is turning to rain just in time for the Monday morning commute. Today is going to be a disaster on the roads I suspect. Drivers here do not know how to handle snow and few cars have the right tires.

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I went to Cirque yesterday in a serious snowfall. It’s a long ride and it’s the worst urban ride on the system. It goes right through Hastings and Main — ground zero of our heroin/fenatyl culture. And I haven’t seen snow like this downtown in three or four years. I wish I could bus out to UBC to walk in the woods, but I love Cirque.

However, when I got there, there was a woman with a toddler on my left. The kid never stopped talking, not for a moment, and loud because of the ambient noise. It was incessant and the mother said nothing, not a word; she was totally engrossed with her cell phone. The kid never stopped talking and she never stopped looking at her phone for the first forty minutes of the show.

All about her people were staring. The two women on my right kept leaning forward and looking across me to look at her, so I said, “shhh” to the woman and child. Not loudly, but it was all I could do. I could not speak under the circumstances; I was too tense.

Well … the woman went ballistic. She started screaming at me, called me a little faggot and said that if she caught me so much as looking at her she’d knock my glasses off. So I left. I abandon my $122 seat. It was hard to walk and breathe. I was having a serious episode, it was dark and when I got to the lobby all the exit doors were barred.

I could not find a way out until I came to doors manned by people who wanted to stop me from leaving. Clearly, they did not want people going outside during the intermission that was about to happen. I was freaked out because it seemed dangerous to me that thousands of people — half a coliseum full — were inside and the exit doors were barred.

They did not want me to leave and I couldn’t speak. All that came out was sounds but it made them stop being gruff and suddenly they were gently asking me if I wanted to leave. I said yes. And then she said that if she let me out, I could not re-enter. I nodded yes. So then she let me out. Then I got back onto the #14 bus.

I am going to have to carry medications with me because sometimes having PTSD makes this hard-core urban Trumpian world very difficult to navigate.

So I come home and find myself looking at real estate porn.

The house above is two duplexes, side by side. The one on the right is for sale for the same price as I would get for my condo. It’s in Qualicum on Vancouver Island. Upstairs it has a two-bedroom suite and downstairs it has a three-bedroom unit and the place is steps from the beach.