Fighting through the cesspool for the good of the bru!

Here we are, trudging along the cesspool that is Montreal's (in)famous Ste. Catherine's Street.

We're in the tourist part, the west part, the part with all the brand-name shops and family chain restaurants. The part with the strip clubs that you can kinda not notice if you aren't paying attention or if you've lived there too long, like we have. The part before it gets reaaaally interesting, the part before what most people would call a cesspool, but what we call degenerate-paradise.

(Degenerate is now a word that degenerates have re-appropriated to be all empowering. Like queer, or cunt. We feel totally empowered now. Being a degenerate isn't a choice, its an honour. Fuck yeah!)

Anyway, Ste. Catherine's West is a cesspool of bewildered tourists, greasy strip club pushers, and a bunch of locals who really just want to get the fuck outta there. You can spot the tourists a mile away, even if they don't have the typical khaki shorts and fanny pack (why, why, why, WHY do so many middle aged tourists wears khaki shorts and fanny packs? Why? It's a fashion nightmare. We refuse to buy anything khaki, just out of fear of eventually evolving into what we dispise). They all meander along the sidewalk looking lost, overwhelmed and bewildered. "This is it?" says their wide, wide eyes. "This is the Montreal that everyone raves about? This branded pornographic strip mall?" And they'll snap pictures of the things the tour book says are important, and when their friends and family ask them about the city, they'll say "Oh it was great!" just to fit in with popular opinion. Even though they never really saw the city at all.

There are puddles everywhere tonight, and the bottoms of our pants are dragging along the wet cement because of course we couldn't have been bothered to hem them. No, we'd much rather be angry at the clothing manufactures for being so bloody pigheaded about their exclusive clothing sizes (a wider waist line does not guarantee a porportinately longer pant leg, dickwads...) then take five minutes and spare ourselves the misery of cold, wet ankles. Alas, we are ridiculously stubborn.

So we trudge along through the cesspool, miserable cuz our ankles are getting wet and we didn't think to grab a jacket upon leaving the house that morning, so we're starting to shiver a little too. Plus the toursits are offending our eyes, and the pushers are offending our ears (maybe not offending... some of those strip club innuendo calls are ingenious!). But we get to the bar (finally) and its cozy inside, and there's delicious beer, and we can forget about the fickle, fiendish weather for a few more hours while we get trashed on a thursday night. Woo.