observer/performer

It was a beautiful damn pure-blue Sunday and I didn't know exactly what to do with it. I was tired and not feeling particularly social and figured I'd head off to the park with a book, a pad of paper and an empty stomach and see what happened.

Swigging luke-cold Coke from a plastic bottle on a rock overlooking the river at Parc Jean Drapeau, I realized how long it had been since I'd been at all sequestered from the city. A pair of ducks bobbed in around the shallow pools on the shore of the St. Laurent. The river rolled out east, the current so strong and manic it gave the river a texture. The wind blew west against the flow, whipping up spray. The conflict seemed unnecessary but the birds paid no mind as they played in between. The current pushed on, accelerating like mad down the centre of the river, but the water pooled back in eddies along the edges, like exit lanes on a superhighway and the water flowed westward down these St. Laurent suburbs.

The male duck sat on a rock contemplatively. It was Sunday, remember. He watched the river cautiously, only gazing over at his partner every so often, maybe just to make sure she was there. His mate was busy. She ducked her head underwater every few seconds. She'd get up, shake off water and then bob back down, her back-end buoyed in the air. She reminded me of a goggle-wearing five-year-old, searching for sea life at the beach. Yet, there didn't seem to be much playfulness with the duck. She wasn't doing this for fun. She was doing it to eat. It was earnest. I felt jealous of that female duck there at that moment. I watched it while burning in the sun and the humid heat that came down like buckets of hot shower water. I studied it, holding a Bic pen and jotting things onto a pad of paper I'd used previously to collect notes of trivial processes while training for my job. I tried to learn something from the duck. But all I knew was that that was all it knew. And I felt envy. It knows what it is here to do.

Seagulls start shrieking. I had forgotten seagulls lived outside of the city. They swooped down over white water. They fought each other whenever one of them found something worth fighting over.

A dog peers over the trial railing ten feet behind and ten feet above me. It yelps then whimpers when its owner yanks its leash. The human is satisfied with her river view. The dog is choked it won't get to play and chase birds and bugs and its reflection in the water.

A little myna with crimson epaulettes the colour of the Red Coats yaps at me. It's telling me something important because it won't move and won't stop squeaking out commands. It's not scared of me. I can understand that, for some reason. The tiny black bird looks like he's trying to tell me something. He's trying to tell me what I should write. But his shrill yips don't translate and so, frustrated, he turns around and starts searching the rock crevices on the shore for lunch. It's movements are herky-jerky, like old wooden stop-motion animation.

The ducks continue to bob and bounce around in the slow moving water. The male has now started to search for grub.

A bug crawls onto my pad of paper to have a read of what I've scrawled down. But the gets bored and flies away.

A seagull falls from the sky to rest on a rock. It ruffles then folds its wings onto its back and stands there staring off into the distance thoughtful as like an Afghan elder. The fucking shit hawk manages to look regal and pensive.

What am I hear to do?

I put my foot down on the rock and cut my big toe on a piece of broken glass. Blood smears on the brown rock. My left eye is itchy and raw from allergies. I have to piss. I'm going to get out of here. I need a band-aid, some Reactin and a pisser.

I pack my things into my book bag. I leave the regal seagull and the ducking ducks and go urinate into an open, white porcelain coffin. I pass a human crouched down in an uncomfortable position to point a gigantic camera contraption at detritus under a rock. I slip $2.75 to a human in a blue suit behind a piece of glass, put a piece of paper into a metal slot and then disappear underground and then under the river in a giant machine.

* * *

Wound up at the Tam Tams on Mont Royal following a phone call. What else was I going to do?

Humanity. More humans than seagulls on the river. People in varying levels of dress and sobriety and sanity. Drums in all corners of the park. Real serious guys looking to get laid pounding out real serious beats with serious faces like they are baring their real serious souls, surrounded by serious-looking guys and girls. Large pits of people slamming anything they have to make noise. Lively rhythms driving old braless hippy ladies with George W. Bush haircuts to dance and watch their melons bob around in their shirts like clumsy people in a horse costume. An old hippy caricature walks around with tinted-glasses and long-combed hair and a green speedo under a dressy vest, popping finger cymbals together. Groups of shirtless people dancing. Some right into it. Others looking at others. Uncomfortable. Doing it to be seen doing it.

But it's what they are supposed to do.

It makes sense.

Montreal is inhabited by performers. Everywhere. All sorts. Everyone is a performer in some way.

Anywhere you walked, you saw someone doing something. There were acrobats, propping people up on their shoulders to balance. There were jugglers and people batting sticks around with other sticks. There were singers and banjo players and guitar players and loads and loads and loads of drum players. There were line-walkers and hoola-hoop dancers. There were circus string acrobats, hanging 20 feet in the air off a tree. There were kids rolling down the grass hills.

There were the weekend warriors, who play war with duct tape swords and shields and inhale dust by the lungful. They are adorned in steel-ringed vests and some of the more serious 'players' wear homemade full-body armour, with fifteen-foot long nerf-like javelins they lunge at opponents. A Japanese samurai warrior comes up behind an enemy with his two swords and, in a flash, rests one sword on the back of the guy's neck and the other against the jugular and slices. It looked a bit too real.

These people are performing. But so was everyone else.

A guy played with his hair until he got it just right, and then he started dancing in a pit. Hard-looking, tattooed-up dudes played with their pitbulls. Hipsters smoked weed and drank beer. Pretty girls wore little. UFC-addict T-shirt-wearing juice heads spoke louder than they had to.

Before long, my friends were doing summersaults and handstands and were crawling around backwards. What were they supposed to do?

It all had rubbed off. I was telling jokes and line-walking.

I couldn't help it. I had to do it.