Main Street

When sitting before the computer is useless, for whatever reason, I go for a walk. And so it was that I set out yesterday for Main Street, where I walked up one side of it and down the other.

This pop-up was popular. Lots inside for the gentleman camper. Of course many of this shop's items will come in handy when most of Vancouver is living outdoors.

Book Warehouse got its start selling books that nobody wanted -- at least not for the 40% mark-up other bookstores were tacking onto them.

This unfortunately titled book is selling for less than the cost its publisher had sought for it.

A few weeks ago I saw in the book bin outside the bookstore across the street from this light post (just left of the green awning)

this book.

Further up the block, at the YWCA Thrift Store, someone with an eye for art, design, fashion and humour is dressing the windows.

At the most southernly point of my walk (Refind was closed) I passed Cottage Bistro, where a couple years ago I stopped late one Tuesday night in search of something to eat, only to find the sixty-something house band struggling to play a song based on a few bars hummed by a tipsy sixty-something patron while the rest of the mostly sixty-something crowd was trying to pick each other up. It was beautiful, man.

For a brief moment in 1981, most of Vancouver looked like this. It, too, was beautiful.

Here is a new statue outside a building whose upstairs advocates on behalf of burn survivors, and whose downstairs is still for lease.

Apart from its dedication, there is no text to accompany this statue. But if there was, it might read like this:

"I'm hungry."

"I'm sorry, Mr Firefighter, but my job is not to feed you but to appear thankful that you have saved me from someone's insurance scam."

And now back to work -- writing a text on, of all things, the Mainstreeters. Below is one of them -- Annastacia -- who, if I am lucky, will be at my local the next time I don't feel like cooking.