I know I have to start being more social and so on and so forth. I mean I don’t have to be more social and so on and so forth, but I want to be more social and so on and so forth and so I paused Superman Returns and I went over to see someone I know dancing in a belly dancing cabaret earlier this evening. Anyhow, it was only three blocks away from my house and so on the making-a-big-effort-to-be-social scale this one was going to be nearly swag for me.
I went over to this place, this Moroccan place, or whatever it is with its pictures of Morocco on the walls and those brass tables held up by those fold up table stands that look like they would collapse with a great clang into a pile of shattered glass and spilled candle wax and scattered foodstuffs if even my foot were to gently graze against one of the legs as I shifted my weight as I was dining and there were fake what I assumed to be typical Moroccan doors on the wall with little coloured lanterns hanging beside them, just as though we were all sitting around in Morocco waiting for a belly dancing show to start and there was a kind of dance-beated up music blaring on the stereo and all kinds of lyrics in Arabic about love and heartbreak (or so I assumed since that’s what every song in every language is pretty much about, although I don’t speak a lick of Arabic) and they brought me a little dish with some yummy olives in it that I ate with a toothpick while I was trying to decide what to order.
Finally I ordered a vegetarian couscous and a vegetarian salad, but I never did get my salad which was good because the couscous was enough by itself and I ordered a kind of tea made with mint leaves and lime essence and orange flowers and something else I’d never heard of and the lady poured it in a long cascading pour down into my little glass cup like the ones at the lime green Iranian restaurant in Halifax that I ate in with Laura that day in the pouring rain before maybe we went out to Lunenburg with everything we owned soaking wet and I don’t remember what order things happened in back in those days but I thought again of those little glass cups anyhow.
This tea that she poured me was maybe the best thing I had ever tasted because before I put my mouth on the rim of the glass I had never imagined that there could be a tea that tasted like this one and after I couldn’t imagine going a long time without drinking this tea again and all in all I was happy that the place was only three blocks from my house.
Still, as my tea was dwindling, and as the belly dancing aficionados began to shuffle in, tossing their heavy coats and scarves and mitts and hats behind them on the sofas and settling into the menus and into their merry conversations, I began to realise that I didn’t like this restaurant at all and actually I didn’t feel much like watching belly dancing, so I got up, paid, and walked out into the night.
I walked down Beaubien for a while and finally I bought some bagels at the Beaubien Bagel factory. There was one miserable man shovelling bagels into the ovens and he scowled at me as I came in and then sold me a six-bag of sesame bagels. This is just where I wanted to be. I went to the IGA in the St. Hubert plaza. I bought cheese and cream cheese and smoked trout and green beans then I thought about what I wanted to do with my life and settled on a few bottles of booze. I walked home in the cold, picking up an old cabinet door, ripped free from its rusty hinges, that was painted a strange colour and nearly rotted on the bottom. You will be my next canvas, I said to it.
I never did watch the end of Superman Returns, but I’m sure that the good guys triumph in the end. I’m sure that a lot of things explode and that Superman earns his keep by catching heavy objects in mid air before they fall on crowds of terrified civilians. I’m sure superman poses in mid-air, muscles bulging and straining, the crowds below him cheering his name.
Unlike most men who are forced to pretend to be boring wankers in order to keep down jobs they don’t really care about, all the while fantasising about flying around the city in red capes and crotch revealing tights looking for action, Superman is living the dream. He doesn’t need my support. Unlike Batman, however, Superman still seems to feel the need to pretend things are not what they seem by courting (and ultimately never being able to satisfy) Lois Lane. At least the caped crusader has the courage of conviction to go out in public with his boyfriend.
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