"Why must you be such a shitdisturber?" an acquaintance asked my uncle Vance.
"Because the whole lot of you bore the shit out of me." Vance proceeded to mount the bull and rode him down Centre Street. The cops eventually caught up with the bull, but not after it rampaged through an antiques store and pizzeria. Vance, on the other hand, wasn't seen for a week after being bucked off unceremoniously mere seconds into the ride. Yeah, he made a habit of disappearing on us as well as the cops.
The authorities attempted to level criminal mischief charges on Vance but habeas corpus proved a mighty obstacle. That and they couldn't definitively confirm whether it was indeed Vance riding an ugly old bull down the street or some hobo looking for a good time. The cops, being cops, cleaned up the mess, fed the store owners reasssuring bullcrap - pun unintended, and went back to their two-hour long half an hour break at the Tim Horton's up on 4oth and Centre.
"Fucking Stampede," Vance told me, that is once he resurfaced. "It's full of fucking teenagers hoping to get laid, hoping their GHB works on the hot stacked blonde and not the blimpy brunette. It's full of overgrown adolescents with too much money and way too much time, cruising in their rented sportscars, hoping to pick up some primo Asian ass. They have been using it long enough. They know their GHB works, fo' shizzle - or whatever assinine shit phrase they mimmick these days. It's full of bored cardboard whores, hoping to score free drinks, and some, extremely delusional ones, hoping to be idolized and adored. It's an excuse to party for a city full of bored cliches. It gives them a chance to exploit and feel, to destroy and consume. It's their excuse to live banally - their sole chance to live at all. The manufactured and pre-packaged party, preordained by fluorescent gods waving silicone tits in their face, simulate, stimulate, titillate. But when the ride's coming down, it's just a matter of more dough. How about another whirl? the shot girl coos in their ear."
He paused to take a swig from his bottle of Jim Beam.
"Sometimes you have to let the bull roam free from its cage, just to see if the fuckers really want to live or whether they just want to buy an escape."
Standing at the corner of 16th and Centre, I stared at a dismantled Douglas Drugs sign, thinking about my nearly spectral uncle Vance. He was an episodic creature. When he appears, he's unstoppable - an irrepressible shitdisturbing agon. But - poof! - he's gone, leaving you wonder whether he was there to being with.
"Neal Cassady," he began a contrarian note, " was a colossal waste of human life. He lived simply for himself. He lived to be the centre, the holy fucking primative, a demonstrative messiah on a perpetual high, and a dirty lowdown sensualist dilettente to the bone. Of course, he was fucking brilliant - a bloody fucking genius really - and wasted it all sucking Ginsberg's or whoever's cock."
"He fell for the same bullshit geniuses have been falling for since Zarathustra: to the max, or not at all."
