The following is a column I wrote in March 2004, entitled Urban Overexposure.
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Every Montrealer has a person or two they keep seeing everywhere they go.
You get on the bus and you see him from the window. You walk down the strip and there he is, peering into a store window. You’re rushing to the post office before it closes and pass him standing at the red light.
These people invade your environment, impose themselves on your reality, they always seem there when you’re out, by coincidence or perhaps by God’s Great Design.
And if they seem annoying to you, then yeah, do the math, chances are that you must be annoying to them, or somebody else.
You might consider introducing yourself to these ambient individuals in transit, but with each passing unspoken encounter the walls get taller and the tradition of alienation grows until it becomes unthinkable to acknowledge them.
Getting to know them is exactly what you don’t want.
At McGill there used to be a languages student walking around with his exaggerated upright Germanic posture. It just irked me just to look at him walking by with his regal pomposity. Years later I was introduced to him at a party last winter. It was awkward.
On the Plateau I couldn't leave my shabby little apartment without seeing this supertall guitarist guy who worked at a paint shop. They said he was an amazing guitarist, but it started driving me nuts just to see him lumbering by Duluth and the Main every day. His identical passage became like an old stale movie, I had to flee the Plateau forever.
These days in the relative suburbia of lower NDG the only real ambulatory human leitmotif my deeply-embedded misanthropy takes aim at is a sour old guy who used to work at the Concordia Library who ambles home by my house.
The strangers-driving-you-mad phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Westmount-raised snobs like myself as I learned when my friend Baz talked about a singer chick he sees at Jimmy’s Laundry in Mile End. The joint is a couple of doors down from the fabled Open Da Night Café and it’s run by an Elvis-lookalike/admirer.
Contrary to the rules of proper social alienation, Baz has actually spoken to the singer chick. “She asked the time. I told her but she wasn't even listening, so she says ‘what?’ and I repeat, and she just walks away without saying thanks, as if I’m a clock.”
Baz complains that the singer chick places her laundry cart in the middle of the aisle. “She leaves it there and takes off so people will have to move it. I’m sure she’d be broken-hearted if nobody has moved it. She’s so desperate that even her objects require attention.”
“Then she starts talking aloud because she’s needy and wants everybody to look at her, she announces that there’s some kind of Kleenex or something in her laundry and two seconds later she tells everybody that it’s not there anymore, as if anybody cared. The woman attendant looks at her ‘Oh that’s good for you’ – so the girl stands there for about 20 seconds. She doesn’t’ want to accept that she’s getting dissed, her silence is a buffer to the emotional trauma of not being given the emotional attention.”
It was a revelation to hear such a detailed savaging of incidental strangers taken to new unforeseen heights. It was funny as hell but also damn discouraging. Such cynical micro-analysts of human behaviour must suffer when the ravenous critic inevitably turns inward.
So what if you or I unknowingly become that guy who seems to be wandering around alone too much, who becomes part of the streetscape of shabbiness, that people look at and think, “oh there goes that guy yet again.”
Shoot, a whole other set of things to worry about.
Baz tells me that there’s no escaping the possibility that your urban overexposure irritates others but he figures that it helps to look good. “The only antidote is to not look like a slob,” he speculates.
You get on the bus and you see him from the window. You walk down the strip and there he is, peering into a store window. You’re rushing to the post office before it closes and pass him standing at the red light.
These people invade your environment, impose themselves on your reality, they always seem there when you’re out, by coincidence or perhaps by God’s Great Design.
And if they seem annoying to you, then yeah, do the math, chances are that you must be annoying to them, or somebody else.
You might consider introducing yourself to these ambient individuals in transit, but with each passing unspoken encounter the walls get taller and the tradition of alienation grows until it becomes unthinkable to acknowledge them.
Getting to know them is exactly what you don’t want.
At McGill there used to be a languages student walking around with his exaggerated upright Germanic posture. It just irked me just to look at him walking by with his regal pomposity. Years later I was introduced to him at a party last winter. It was awkward.
On the Plateau I couldn't leave my shabby little apartment without seeing this supertall guitarist guy who worked at a paint shop. They said he was an amazing guitarist, but it started driving me nuts just to see him lumbering by Duluth and the Main every day. His identical passage became like an old stale movie, I had to flee the Plateau forever.
These days in the relative suburbia of lower NDG the only real ambulatory human leitmotif my deeply-embedded misanthropy takes aim at is a sour old guy who used to work at the Concordia Library who ambles home by my house.
The strangers-driving-you-mad phenomenon isn’t exclusive to Westmount-raised snobs like myself as I learned when my friend Baz talked about a singer chick he sees at Jimmy’s Laundry in Mile End. The joint is a couple of doors down from the fabled Open Da Night Café and it’s run by an Elvis-lookalike/admirer.
Contrary to the rules of proper social alienation, Baz has actually spoken to the singer chick. “She asked the time. I told her but she wasn't even listening, so she says ‘what?’ and I repeat, and she just walks away without saying thanks, as if I’m a clock.”
Baz complains that the singer chick places her laundry cart in the middle of the aisle. “She leaves it there and takes off so people will have to move it. I’m sure she’d be broken-hearted if nobody has moved it. She’s so desperate that even her objects require attention.”
“Then she starts talking aloud because she’s needy and wants everybody to look at her, she announces that there’s some kind of Kleenex or something in her laundry and two seconds later she tells everybody that it’s not there anymore, as if anybody cared. The woman attendant looks at her ‘Oh that’s good for you’ – so the girl stands there for about 20 seconds. She doesn’t’ want to accept that she’s getting dissed, her silence is a buffer to the emotional trauma of not being given the emotional attention.”
It was a revelation to hear such a detailed savaging of incidental strangers taken to new unforeseen heights. It was funny as hell but also damn discouraging. Such cynical micro-analysts of human behaviour must suffer when the ravenous critic inevitably turns inward.
So what if you or I unknowingly become that guy who seems to be wandering around alone too much, who becomes part of the streetscape of shabbiness, that people look at and think, “oh there goes that guy yet again.”
Shoot, a whole other set of things to worry about.
Baz tells me that there’s no escaping the possibility that your urban overexposure irritates others but he figures that it helps to look good. “The only antidote is to not look like a slob,” he speculates.