Diner Dash

With her love affair with the Toshiba waning, and Phil at work, she decided on the most novel of ideas: to go for a walk. She had realized while sitting alone on her couch that she hadn’t really done anything that day to remotely scrape together a blog entry. Her morning routine not actually beginning until noon, coupled with her fear of the next day: a “work” day (she really only has 3 of those a week, but those 3 days are, in her defense, evil days which have her beginning her job at 7pm and not returning her home until after 5am, all the while serving drunken university students milkshakes, poutine and scalding hot soup…oh, and throw a few patriotic French-Speaking Quebecois into the mix with sole life-missions to make the life of the non-French-speaking waitress extremely difficult) leaves her with an evening free to reflect on all the things she didn‘t do.

Work days are feared days. And she has every right to be incapacitated by the very thought of them. The strongest of you would resort to the comfort of the curled and rocking fetal position; driven to it by the smallest reminisce of the chaos called her job, of the billion people flooding in and out of those diner doors for the abundance of cheap and quickly prepared pizzas and pitas and poutines-and NEVER getting kicked out for being too intoxicated to stand. (Oh, and for the more discerning of gastronomic tastes, try the Souvlaki or our Rib Steak, might we recommend our house red? (It's our only red) It is full-bodied with an oaky taste-oh wait, that might just be the taste of the cardboard seeping through).

It’s not only the confusion endured for each hour as she leaps over communication obstacles such as the French language with her patrons, or the Greek, and Hindi accents in the English of her bosses and co-workers, (she does wonder what her French will sound like if it’s getting it’s foundation from this motley crew of 1st generation Canadians), but also the screaming pain her legs and arms and body retire in.

As she spends the first day or so recovering from her 3 days of what can only be explained as Karma paying her back for how badly she treated her brother, and at least a couple of days leading up to those 3 foreboding ones preparing both mentally and physically for it’s next round of battering, it is a marvel that, that on the eve of her work day, she would find the bravado to face Friday night Montreal and the slow mob of funneled pedestrians through what seems to be an endless maze of scaffolding stuffed along Rue St Catherine. The "maze of scaffolding" she can't help but think as being a deliberate gesture of irony from the city of what it's seemingly not, if measured by foot-pace that is: a rat race.

She nor Phil have been able to figure out the oddity of the Montrealer's walking pace. For being "technically" Canada's largest city, a business, cosmopolitan and cultural landmark in North America, it's an absurdity that the average Montrealer appears to have no place to go. Dressed in well-fitting designer suits, puffing on their cigars, they show this fact to each other as they stroll at a snails pace up and down one of it's biggest thoroughfares. It's an anomaly. The whole experience of trying to get from point A to point B-especially if one is needing to get somewhere via that street makes running into oncoming traffic an attractive solution. This Friday night was proved to be no different, so she returned home.