Death By a Thousand Convenient Cuts

I’ve found myself in the pursuit of my writing dreams, spending most of my recent @#$%^& life looking for parking at the Westview Shopping Center. You know the one, with too small spaces for cars jammed too close together? In which everyone else is at because it handily has a liquor store, a bakery, several fast food stops, and also our physio, orthodontist, family dentist, and grocery store. And a gas station. And the clothing store where I recently caved and bought a pair of high wasted jeans, which was inevitable. Also, there is a pub, smack in the middle of the parking lot, which is a hard place to sum up in few words, except it was rated very high on the “places to pick up” list and I think has a time portal in one of the bathrooms to the eighties. Not to say I haven’t gotten liquored up there a few times or not danced to “I Like Big Butts” there, because I have, and it’s the kind of place where everyone else knows the words as well, so, you know, just embrace this drunken time with your new butt-shaking buddies. Live for tonight! (But stop off on the way home for Gatorade and Pringles, for tomorrow).

Almost everything I need in this one small space, only two km from my house, which seems like it should be celebrated. It should be, shouldn’t it, this Oasis of Convenience. I think I even found my dentist here because I initially thought, so close! What a great idea with all the teeth we have!
But the Westview Parking Lot can be an eat-or-be-eaten kind of place. I told my son that when he, in the near future, needed to get his driver’s license, he would need to log in several hours of driving just in this small space, to which he said “nooooooooooooo!” I continued to explain that if he could drive here, he could handle driving in most foreign countries. That he would definitely hit something. Then he could learn how to exchange insurance numbers, or if he wants to live with the karma, leave a note that says “I am writing this note because I hit your bumper but mostly because people are watching me and thinking I am leaving my phone number, which I am not doing, because I am broke. Sooorryyyy.” I got one of those once. Which was sort of charming, in a way.

I’m here all the time because it IS so close to my house. If it weren’t, I’d schedule more things on one day, instead of a smattering of these uber-convenient things all the time. Its like…death by a thousand convenient cuts. In my silliness, I assumed I’d be walking or biking to this Nirvana, but that was in my perfect world before I remembered that biking in the rain with no protection from cars, carrying groceries, in the dark, was not my idea of fun or safety. Did I mention parking is a shit-show? People actually speed up to get out of there, and there is always someone yelling or swearing. If there’s a semi trying to leave with its grocery load that gets stuck (this happens regularly), the build-up of cars backs into the highway traffic, and then, my friends, there is a cacophony of horns. It’s then that I think, you idjit, you did this to yourself. Why are you not at home producing some work of value? Why are you standing in the chips aisle buying three, get one free goldfish crackers, even though your children are 11 and 14?

Although this is not high ranking on the list of actual problems, I find my Convenient Oasis to be a soul-sucking place. I need to embrace the neon lights somehow, the gold lions decorating the entrance to the pub, the recycled and stinky shaved ice of the fishmongers, the handy $1.25 slice of pizza. I need to somehow just…go with it. And I need to figure out how to give this shopping center only one day out of my seven, and no more, for both of our sakes, because this place reminds me that life sometimes is reduced, like a rue gone too far, to mere sticky bits of tasks, chores, and errands, and that’s just no way to get on with life.