Two's a crowd

Hello, seekers:

Well, long time no see. I've been busy with a lot of shit, and a lot of it has been shittier shit than I wanted to deal with and shittier shit than I want to talk about. But I am still here, and I actually remembered the password to get into this "blog," which is a minor miracle because I have forgotten more passwords than you'll probably ever have to know. But that's beside the point.

What brings me here today is to tell you about another ridiculous event, and it's yet another that will be burned into my brain forever. And the best part is that now it will be burned into your brain forever, too. Lucky you. But listen up, because it is a good tale. It might be better in the oral tradition, but unless you are sending plane fare and promise me single malt scotch on arrival I am not coming to your house to tell it. So you'll have to settle for this medium.

Anyway, the setup. I went to Montreal for two days last week. Montreal is the greatest city in North America, and I say that full well knowing I have not been to all the cities in North America, and even if I had time and money to go to all of them I wouldn't bother because I know that Montreal is the best of the lot.

It used to be better, back before the American dollar became about as value as a wad of used asswiping paper. But it's still marginally worth a little more than a Canadian buck. But the sights in Montreal are great, and the food is the best around. Lots of great restaurants for a reasonable amount of money. Also, for some reason it amuses me to hear people speaking a foreign language. I don't understand a word of French (OK...merci, pardon, menage a trois...that's about it), but it's kind of fun to walk down the street and wonder what the hell people are talking about. Like mysterious, you know? Is this store clerk telling me that the newspaper is a dollar, or that my zipper is down and everyone is having a big laugh on me? I think it's fun not to know, because in my real, non-Montreal life there is a whole lot going on that I wish I could not hear and understand, so I have a rare chance not to know what the assholes around me are talking about.

When I go to Montreal I usually go by bus. It is about a 220-mile drive from my house, and I am far too fucking lazy to drive that far. I would take the train, but for some reason the train from here makes 300 stops along the way, and by the time I would get there it would be time to turn around and come back, so that's out.

So it came time to leave Montreal, and I went to the Greyhound station. I was early, so I went next do to a little cafe called Le Shithole or something like that and had a bite to tide me over for the trip. I had something called poutine, which is a horrific French Canadian dish. It's basically French fries with some kind of oily cheese glop all over it. (See photo at beginning of screed.) I don't know why I enjoy eating this low point in Quebecois cuisine; perhaps it's because even though no one in Quebec actually likes it, eating it makes me feel like one of the Montreal hoi polloi rather than some asshole American.

After I finished my poutine (it was horrible, of course), I had poutine "gravy" all over my hands, so I decided to go into the restroom to wash up. I went to the door that said MEN-HOMMES on it, and it had a push-down handle, and for some reason I assumed it was a regular restroom. So I pushed the door open and started to walk in...only to find it was a one-person bathroom, it was occupied by a squat, beady-eyed man with an insufferable moustache who was sitting on the crapper. Our eyes locked, and he immediately became enraged.

"Pardon!" I said (with the French accent, best I could manage), and started to retreat.

"Why you poosh, poosh, poosh on de door?" he demanded. I started skulking away, and I could hear him yelling as I retreated. "Why you poosh on de door! Fuuul!!! Fuuul!! Poosh on de door! Fuuul!!!" Pardon me for writing "fuul," which does not do justice to the word he was saying, which was "fool" in heavily accented Quebecois and as such sounded laughingly like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau berating a parking offender.

If you have been here before, you may remember that I'd had an incident in which I'd barged in on some jackass sitting on the crapper at a Borders bookstore while reading a pile of unpaid-for books. This was somehow worse. The Borders guy was embarrassed. This guy was enraged, and I do not like enraging people in foreign countries. You never know what they are going to do, you know? For all I know, it could be legal in Quebec to shoot someone who walks in on you in the shitter. Or it could even be a social requirement. I am reasonably sure this is not the case anywhere in America, but for Christ's sake they speak French in that fucking place, and God only knows what kind of nonsense might be part of local tradition.

So I humped back over to the bus station and sat and waited. When it came time to get my bus, I walked out the door and there, for the love of Christ, he was.

He was the fucking bus driver. The guy I'd walked in on while he was taking a dump would have my life in his hands for more than 200 miles.

His eyes locked into mine, just as they had in that little mini-crapper, and they were as red as a high school kid's nuts on prom night.

And there were only three people waiting to get on! This meant it'd be unlikely there would be someone else on the bus who would be a big enough asshole to distract this guy from his thoughts of hatred about me. I would be the subject of this guy's personal Five Hours Hate. And Christ...there was nowhere to escape!

And so I sat there the whole trip, knowing he was hating me for what I had done, even though the truth is that the bastard should have known enough to lock the door. Why should I have knocked? It didn't look like that sort of operation.

About four hours into the trip we stopped for a meal break, and I got out and got some coffee. The driver got off, too, and sat across from me at the counter, and glared at me the whole fucking time. He looked about as happy as if he'd caught me buggering one of his sisters or something. And he wouldn't stop starting with those red eyes and that stupid moustache.

All this because I ate some poutine and got my hands greasy. Maybe this is why Wet-Naps were invented, because some poor asshole wanted to wash his hands and wound up unwittingly waltzing into the middle of someone's treasured four-minute private shit party.

So that's twice in a year I've had this happen. Enough is enough.