Summer has cooled off quite a bit and I’m wearing a light jacket as I sit at the terrace of the Trees Organic Coffee Shop on Granville Street, reading the Lord of the Rings in Spanish. Inside, two guys are jamming live on guitars and a mic. The sky is an angry shade of gray, its clouds blowing in from the southeast. I can see the Diamond Princess’ smoke stack at the end of the street. People wander past me, strolling down the city streets in a nonchalant fashion. No matter what day or time of the week, nobody ever seems to be busy, in Vancouver. They want to add a tenth planet to the solar system. Will all the horoscope gurus have to redesign their random prediction gimmicks? I might go to the movies later. If M. Night Shyamalan managed to come up with The Sixth Sense, maybe he also aced Lady in the Water. Or maybe not. This blog post is about nothingness. A lady walks by with a cockatoo on her shoulder. The bird is wearing a collar. Nail biter? The jamming inside has chaotic tendencies. It launches into high frequency hyperboles and leaves me behind. 101 languages are spoken around me. I wish I spoke Russian. I still love the USSR anthem. A young couple ventures into Birks. Are they looking for a ring? One ring to rule them both, and in the lightness bind them. An ambulance rushes by, loud siren screaming and heads turning. Some poor soul’s life might be hanging by a thread, or maybe they just got their pinky finger caught in a door. A person’s emergencies are another person’s bread. We feed on trouble. A society without trouble wouldn’t be able to sustain itself.

Time to go to work. Time to escape the grayness of the day, to get busy jamming on my own speeches like a trained parrot, juggling with languages, high on coffee, looking down at the diamond they board or the one they wear, at the city’s emergencies unraveling themselves, at life playing on its own big screen.

Time to fall asleep and dream of being awake again.

Time to be on time. While there remains some.