sensitivity training 101 - on casinos and their food courts

tonight i walked into a casino
looking for the "food court"
and found myself somewhere between the cracks--
it's 2 am and people are lounging in their businesswear and fuck
i'm white but dirty-scruffy, people stare but don't question, and i'm
friendly-fullofaffinity towards the people sweeping, cleaning, mopping, serving
(i asked, "do you like working here?"
and one woman said, "it's okay." and smiled strangely)
or maybe i was the strange one--
oversized dad-coat and bleachedpants, suspenders, my anarchy-democracy sneakers,
hood up,
i closed my eyes to walk through the lines and lines of moneygames,
people sitting like watching TV but playing for high stakes,
what a different kind of "limits" than the spheres
i usually like to touch.

anyway,
i bumped into people and things,
trying to avoid visual overstimulation,
and cause i was white they let me go everywhere, the manager
doublechecked the miso drypowder to see if it was veg
and apologized about the fish stock
and i apologized back to the chinese woman working there
because i felt out of place, guilty, kind of haunted.
"sorry" when my habits of forming chains of association mean that
oh wait i can't eat ANYTHING here and now i'm just picky and you're sorry
so let's cut it all short and i'm sorry.
it's not an apology, i'm just sick of you working here and me eating this shit and the world spinning a speed set by the clanking of change (into the casino owner's pocket at the end of the day, not that fisherman whose fish became dry stock became a little powdered packetbag but don't worry "it's japanese" you just haven't heard of it)

the feeling stuck with me on the bus back to white rock,
just sad,
not enough consumer,
not quite autonomous,
not american, not canadian, and yeah i'm thrilled with my nomadic mentality except it's hard to always be thrilled with being an outsider when most people are still eating up the global-capitalist-nationalist lies we're all told to swallow for our own good,
so i'm left as nothing but a sketch kid in his dad's big jacket
(perfect for liberation, i thought! but who knows about these canadian liquor depots...)

generally, before that,
my night was okay,
a fabulous rendezvous with cecile at a bar called "lolita's" on davie (gay) street,
warm family times.
but my life, built to be better and better for me and the world,
makes me so sensitive to all this BULLshit and oily inorganic faux-"mediterranean" pizza and miso soup from a dried package and fish stock and plastic spoons and styrofoam and teriyaki-who-knows-what and somethings masquerading as vegetables
and i just want to cook for myself, just want some autonomy, just wanna know
where everything comes from and feel good about everything in my body
but at 2 a.m. in vancouver stuck at the bridgeport skytrain-station-slash-casino,
life sometimes gets complicated
+ watearfalls (not cachoeiras, this is a different breed i tell you)
+ demographically oriented marketing
+ dreams of a better life but you know, i think you're not gonna find it here
and i'm pretty sure i'm heading in the right direction for me but sometimes it makes life a little hard to take.

finally back here,
after the taxi driver who rescued me offered me red-white-blue wine and asked
"you don't like girls? you don't like boys? who are you?"
with his arm creeping round my shoulder onto my thigh and oh oh oh please just get me to marine street)

missing the 24 hour plays, buddies, festivities, celebration,
queer love,
hugs,
karma,
spontanaeity,
lentils,
fabrications of autonomy,
fabric of reality,
lots of things lacking&surfeiting tonight. looking forward to coming home tomorrow.

and casinos suck for reasons! now you know!