Triple Overhead Swell in Suburbia Brings Out the Bikers

i will love the way you look at me,
the way you look into my eyes, and show me
everything's all right.
across these waters that has come between us,
my heart beats fast...

That Unexpected Swell Spits Green


You follow the right forecasts and head for the right shores and you too could hit on the unexpected swell of the season. Largest for the country. Look out The Mansbridge is on his way.

Traversing the barren plains of near-suburbia, the land where I have been forced to rest my head for now, heading south, and out and out and out -- towards the cusp of it all -- the new oil and mineral fueled explosion: nouveau suburbia. On my bike. The unexpected happens.

A giant turquoise wave rises up. Untouched. Pristine. Just begging its hardest for some rider to carve out the perfect line and read it like a book. That rider was me. The time was ideal. I laid low while a white work half-ton drove by on the ridge behind. But then I was off. And in the flying greenish shit and slippery mud I gave'er hell. As I was pounding along I realized there was a good chance shit that green was poisonous or carcinogenic. But then again, what isn't these days? What doesn't pollute your body/mind/soul? My grandma always told me not to eat coloured Rice Crispies since food colouring gives you cancer. Nope. What I was doing was the most freeing, relaxing and healthy thing I could possibly do. Just follow the patterns, in even the most banal mockry of existence and you too could find yourself "surfing" a triple overhead.

Before: "Danger"

After: Well-ridden thank you very much.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Destiny Shone Down and So I Listened


A white light shone down off in the distance where a magnificent outcropping of identical houses had popped up. I had seen this before -- in Alberta last year. When I bussed through -- this is the exact same feeling I got when I looked out on the outskirt construction there. Now imported to Saskatchewan. A tide moves East. Oil under the ground. To be exploited with no real regulation. Poor Chinese labourers double their money through the real estate market.


The were selling bliss. So regal. Just like castles. But without the tradition. Nothing to hold us back. Nouveau riche eat up that pie in the sky. Upward mobility is the name of the game.


It feels like Baghdad out there. Powerful trucks bob up and down along wavy dirt roads while daily life goes on. Half the homes are lived in the other half are skeletons. There's no real distinction or separation here between the shirtless work crews and the soccer moms (one mini-van had a license plate that said "I Love Ringette"). A mother pushes a stroller. Of course the difference is this is the result of a resource extraction fueled economic explosion in a lucky country, not a CNN-style shock-and-awe cluster-fuck bombed out "progress" explosion.


I was nosing around at the scent of good-paying work. There were a few guys working on cement at the mouth of the beast. There was much paving to be done. And so much landscaping. Just tons. The bosses all want you to know them by their first names, they'll go right over everything they'd be looking for, and go out of their way to get you a business card. In short, they're hurting for guys. One company just has a shitload of sod to lay here, and it has to be done in the next few weeks, the guy said.

To catch these things in the middle of the day is kind of fun, and you see interesting contraptions and things. Watch bobcats spinning around, for example. Or like, there was one guy on the back of a truck loading shingles onto a conveyor belt, kind of like the ones we have in the grind section of the burger factory for loading meat onto the line, except modified specifically for shingles. Then there was another guy at the top who would grab the shingles once they reached the top, and set them down right next to the last package. It was kind of methodical. Grab, set, rise, grab, plonk! Grab, set, rise, grab, plonk! Grab, set, rise, grab, plonk! And on and on in the heavy sun. No speech. Just work. Just the pure, enduring, gradual, pace of economic expansion.


It's like I stepped into another whole dimension or something. Where everything goes. Your normality is half baked but overcooked. Golf ball sits on the side of the road with no course in sight. Pink rubber boots lay out at the front of the house while the one next to it has no steps. There are price tags on the doorknobs and miniature bushes. I pass by clusters of people, within feet of them, and they don't even notice me. Only saying, "Yep. 500 watt metal halogen. Right about there for the sign. Uh-huh. Pointing up from the sod." A lady in a leopard print dress smiles at me though. She looks at me the way almost-grandmothers look at me when they're thinking about a time their child roared and they didn't get to see it, but were proud of them for it. I was really glad she waved.


I noticed a few things while giving myself an on-the-ground history lesson, riding from the old housing developments to the new up-and-coming ones. First off they are way fucking huger now than they used to be -- by about three times, just count the number of garage doors and cars parked out front. Second, instead of being laid out in a grid, they are way more pointless boulevards, cul-de-sacs and that sort of thing. And third, the homes are more identical to each other than the older ones I passed. I can only think of how this trend models the wealth expansion that took place in this country over the exact same time period as labour resources were harassed in emerging states around the world to a degree never seen before, where a man could easily make twice as much what his father had made. Does money make us fat and boring?

+++++++++++++++++

Mass Coffee Saloon


So I go into the new local watering hole. Surprise, surprise. Tim Horton's. The guy that runs the company thinks he's all gangster and shit. Told a newspaper one time that he knows how things work on the streets. I fucking laughed my ass off since I was reading the article on the streetcar while passing through the ghetto downtown. Those kids don't drink Tim Horton's. There isn't even one at all around in the area. But what they do know is money -- and how to make it. And I couldn't help but deny that they too had hit a sweet spot. They were prepped for success.

As I walked inside, even though it was only a commercial coffee shop, I felt like I was walking into a roadhouse bar down in New Mexico or Nevada or something. I had just come from the modern Canadian equivalent of the frontier -- where those looking to live rich are just staking out their existence, their lifestyle. This was the watering hole for construction kids, travelers and the newly minted locals. I thought I'd just sit back with a drink and soak it in.

Chilled out, exhausted from the rough terrain and hard riding, this is what I could have swore I heard playing over the bland radio:

"...The money has died ahhhh!!!!!! Ohahahahahah! Hahahaeuahahahya!!!! [end of song] ... It will show you a life you can understand... Hate without love.... Iraqi road..."

This is the shitty music these people listen to, drive to, party to. I felt like it was trying to tell me something by I couldn't quite make it out.

I tried to catch up with a construction guy to see if he had any cash-cow gig leads before he jetted out of the Timmie's, but I swerved back inside after I realized he was too far ahead and I wasn't THAT desperate (I mean, shit, the odds were in MY favour after all anyways).

It was then that I caught sight of the lady with dark dyed hair and heavy makeup heading inside too. I had first noticed her on the way in and I was a bit curious. Seemed like she had a story. But I had forgotten about her until now, as I trudged back inside.

And then all of the sudden there she was again, as I walked past the far counter and I actually almost bumped into her. This kind of scared me because I was afraid she might think I was some creep who had been following that construction dude. But to my amazement she nervously laughed and said, "Oh, don't worry. I wasn't following you or anything like that." See she was afraid of the exact same thing I was. And so we got to talking.

I wasn't quite sure how to approach her. She wasn't young at all. But somehow she didn't feel old. Like the auntie your mom never wanted you to meet. She had a big Merlin wizard with a crescent moon over it tattooed on her shoulder. I remembered some of Patrick's stuff he put up in his room had that flavour. And when James moved into my old room the first thing he put up was this big wizard-type thing just outside the door. Plus I've known other bikers who dig wizards. I just thought it looked rad. I asked her about it and she let me check the big one of some sort of goddess on her back. Smooth, healthy skin.

A metal worker, she knew the value of hard work. Look to the unions for a good job, she advised me a couple times. Course, I'm already in a union right now. But I got her point.

It was when I asked her about her motorcycle, though, that instantly she hit her stride. Turns out Gayle's a road-warrior to the death, one of the true riders. She's been going about 30 years and won't be stopping anytime soon. She looked me in the eyes and said comically, "You know, when it gets in your blood after first doing it, you can't get it out." But I knew better. She wasn't joking. Fearless but relaxed, she'll ride with the best of 'em -- putting men in their place left and right when she has to. Good on her, fuck! One of the stickers on her helmet reads: "If your dick was half the size of your mouth I might be interested!" She knows how the scene runs. And this is her life.

"Let's go out for a smoke." And so we did. The perfect antidote to a pre-fab grandiose mortgaged subdivision.

She was just on her way to take her bike in to get all stenciled up. Big huge fucking things all the way down the back. She's been saving up for this for awhile. "Maybe the Harley dealership will give me a loner," she said. Probably not.

I sat down first, and she decided she'd follow.

The road is a harsh mistress sometimes though, and the semis and vans can be life threatening. Gayle told me about a friend of hers who was sucked under a vehicle off her bike. She had been riding with her kid. The kid survived. She didn't. That was just a little while back. The danger rings fresh in the mind. I thought about Micheal J. Sinclair.

I told her about surfing. How much it meant to me to do it and all that. It didn't surprise me that she understood. She just seemed like she would. In fact, a lot of my rides and people I meet can really connect with it. Moreso even than my friends can. It's kind of weird how that happens. For me surfing has become this fun bridge-builder and boundary-eraser. And that's exactly what it should be.

And as we sat, just chilling on the newly formed curb in front of her Harley, a boy followed his father out of the Tim Horton's entranceway. In large bright letters the only thing his shirt said was: "OCEAN".

And so she told me about a run down to California and Mexico she just got back from. Tijuana's just nuts, she says. Like so many of the others, to save having to get her vehicle licensed, she parked at the border and walked on down in. She just loved all the little shops of all kinds everywhere. There's all sorts of commotion. She went around and bought a bunch of silver bracelets for nothing. Then she brought them back and had them appraised -- turns out they're real silver.

And she knows about the bandits, the drugs and the questionable policing and legal practices. "Boy, you don't want to get caught doing anything down there," she said. "Nope. If you go to jail there you're done. Lock you up and throw away the key."

Hearing her talk about her trip and just how the general atmosphere and everything is down there made me really excited. For her. And it gave me a boost too, for my plans. It made me want to be there so bad. It was just so fresh on my ears to hear it from someone who'd actually been there and done it up right. In style. With a Harley.

But cigarettes go out. Appointments need to be kept. And dreams need preparing (via making it to work at the factory on time). And so we had to head our separate ways.

But with someone as rad as her floating around up and down the highways and byways of the world, and she said it too, you never know what might happen. "You meet the most unexpected people in the strangest places," she said. And I couldn't agree more.

Maybe I'll see her again. I told her I hoped so.


I head back to work, to do what I can to keep my own ride moving along...

I've been living through the boom, hitting and missing, everything slightly chaotic.

But I'm really starting to feel it...

Just wait...

I promise you.... I'm almost there (I tell myself this over and over again).

All I need is an exit strategy.

++++++++++++++++++++++


Listen to:

-> yo, thanks a mil Bryan for the tunes

-Bombs Over Providence "May Cruise Missile Diplomacy Keep Us Truthful Good and Mild"
-Van Atta High "Eyes on the Prize"
-Panic! at the Disco "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage"
-The International Noise Conspiracy "My Star"
-Spoken "Across these Waters"
-The Whilhelm Scream "The Kids Can Eat a Bag of Dicks"
-Ninjaspy "Hit by a Cement Mixer"

*Here's some tunage that falls a little more towards the adolescent screamo-punk-and-moving-towards-electro end of the spectrum -- a suburban development over the last half-decade I swear. How can you not like the titles???????

I mean.

For serious.

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