Just got back into town on Thursday night after attending the funeral up north; it has been a bad weather week pretty much all over Ontario, so travel has not been easy.
Apparently, western Canada got some pretty hefty storms earlier this week too; Spouse and I were talking to one fellow after the funeral who was telling us a tale of woe about his efforts to make it across the country in time for the service. This fellow lives in a small town in the interior of British Columbia; he’s a bit of a ski bum and a ne’er do well of sorts. He had obviously gotten his hair cut earlier that day and he was bemoaning his usual problems with securing tonsorial services: the town he lives in is small and he has to book ahead by two weeks to get an appointment with the lady in town who cuts his hair for $17. This is difficult, he said, because “who knows they’re going to have seventeen dollars in two weeks?”
And here I am bemoaning the fact that the nearest (bank-owned) ATM is roughly a mile away, so I often go cashless for long stretches. Meanwhile, as society apparently breaks down every time you don’t haul out a Visa CheckCard (watching live TV = too … MANY … commercials — beer makes me attractive, right?), I’ve gotten a bit unfamiliar with this paper stuff; I’ve been keeping a US $10 in my wallet for the last month solely because of the remarkable colors — muted pastels done up in a Ted-Turner-gone-wild mode.
Even I have recently succumbed to the debit card pressures; I’ve found myself wandering the streets more often than not with no cash in my pocket over the last few months. This is definitely strange for me – even when I didn’t have much money at all (not that I’m Rockefeller now, but there was a time when the only thing that separated me from hobo-hood was my refusal to eat from the trash), I carried whatever change I had…
…and by the way, if you’re drinking beer, you must already be attractive.