Pullin’ out all the stops tonight because I am ill and I have no energy and so I am not inclined to filter myself or hold myself to a high standard of journaling excellence and so tonight’s entry will be even more stream of consciousness than usual.

I had an idea for tonight. I was going to write about how hard it is to be yourself. How it’s easy to say but hard to do because you have to turn off the part of your mind that deals with the opinions of others and that’s a big part of us.

I guess you just have to reach the point where you are good and mad and fed up with the bullshit and declare yourself awesome.

I am working on it.

The whole apartment is sick. Poor Julian has been coughing up for three or four days now. He chose to use one of our saucepans as the receptacle of his expectoration. I really wish he had not done that. It’s intensely gross. Don’t use something we cook in to house your diseased sputum! Find something else!

Preferably something disposable.

Joe and I, on the other hand, seem to have caught the exact same bug. Maybe it’s the same as the one Julian has, but it ain’t necessarily so. I read today that this has been a particularly harsh flu season in Canada, and I am in the proximity of a lot of people on school days, what with the traveling on the Skytrain and being cooped up with classmates and walking in the cold.

Speaking of the cold, man, what the fuck is with this continuing to be real winter around here? We have snow on the ground and ice on sidewalks and everything. Normally it’s iffy whether we are going to get even a single day of “real winter” in this area, and yet this year we have had around a month of it…. except for on Christmas Day, of course.

We didn’t get a white Xmas, we got a white Everything Else. And it sucks.

And of course, the people around here don’t know how to handle it. Winter has always been, at most, a temporary inconvenience some time in December around here. Something you just wait out. But now that it seems like this winter shit is here to say, people are starting to go a little crazy.

So much so that an issue that I thought I would never see again – not while I live here in the GVRD anyhow. The issue is road salt.

There’s not nearly enough of it to go around in this region.

Now for those of you who did not grow up with Maritime winters, this might not seem like that big of a deal. You might also think that this is only a problem for the governments that are supposed to keep the roads ice free.  But it is far, far more than that.

It’s the consumer market that is the issue. When I was growing up, periodically the Canadian Tire and other businesses would run out of road salt and there would be a delay before any more came in, and people got downright testy.

See, it starts when your average citizen looks over at their neighbor’s yard and sees a perfectly ice free driveway and walkway. It’s almost like they are in an entirely different season. Then he looks at the ice and snow on this own property, and he starts to feel jealous and that leads to him to feeling like a victim of injustice and if you multiply that by enough fellow citizens, that leads to angry mobs descending on anyplace even rumoured to have road salt.

That’s what consumer society does to people. We find it extremely hard to believe that what we want is not there when we want it. Instead, people rapidly become convinced that some people are “hoarding” it (a very non-capitalistic thought) or that the businesses that usually sell it are “holding back some for their friends and family” (ditto), and things can get really tense really fast. ^[1]

That’s what has happened here, in spades. The local fire departments, with the best of intentions but without any experience in this kind of situation, offered people free road salt to tide them over till the stores get more…. and then were completely overwhelmed when they were swamped with cranky, entitled people by the hundreds.

One guy showed up in a pickup truck with two enormous garbage cans in the back and expected to have those filled up. No doubt this titan of industry he had the intention of reselling the stuff.

But no, citizens got two small bags of the stuff each and that’s it. Even so, the fire stations rapidly ran out, and had to put up enormous banners telling people that they had no more road salt and they would have to do without.

I bet there were a lot of people who got really angry about that. Because suddenly, the idea of others having something that others do not bothers them.

Myself, I just want it to be over already, like everyone else. I am completely over my desire for “real winter” and would be happy with the usual clammy Vancouver winter by this point. It would be worth it just to have it be warmer.

Who knows, maybe I will be singing a different tune if the drippier form of winter returns. But I am serious about the possibility of that never happening. Global warming is changing everything and there are a lot more shifts in the future. Areas of the world maybe totally change climates. The jet stream is making radical changes of route. Forests could become deserts and vice versa. Coastal areas could become swamps and swamps could try out and become farmland. Anything might happen.

But hey…. at least it’s not my end of the boat that’s on fire, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.