Vancouver is a city that’s full of surprises. Not all of them good. You can try to plan and account for everything when you’re making a trip downtown. Except the unexpected. Because that’s the nature of the unexpected. After enough exposure to something you can work that into your plan, but when you don’t know then you don’t know. And when you don’t know a thing, that thing can take you by surprise through brute force.

We left a training session downtown. There was some event happening. We didn’t even know about it. Probably because it had to deal with the homeless situation downtown, and most decent people don’t care about that. Until election time or funding goes over-seas, suddenly people give a shit about the homeless person they pass every day, the person they typically do their best not to look at.

We’re forced on a crawling detour. Lights keep changing from green to amber to red and back again. Little white men, forever frozen mid-stride, continually light up, followed by bright hands that are supposed to mean don’t walk but downtown nobody pays any attention to that. The usual rules of a civilized society don’t apply down here.

The radio is on and this is a mistake. It’s a mistake most days but when you’re trapped in traffic and not really moving you’ll hear the same seven songs again and again and again.

Something demands my attention from the entrance of a closed store. It’s a man. What’s left of him after a rough life. And he’s inspecting his calf. It’s bleeding. I point so my friend sees what I see.

He’s digging his finger into an open wound. Blood trickles down his leg and all over the place from there. He produces a pair of scissors he had sitting on a ledge, he digs one blade into his calf again. He moves it around. Puts the scissors on the ledge and puts his finger back into the wound.

It’s a horrible sight. It’s a horrible way to live, if you want to be so bold as to call it that. The man is determined. I wonder what he’s looking for, maybe it’s bugs or implants. Maybe he’s just curious and poking around. Who knows.

This continues while we inch our way through the detour. Perhaps we can work this type of thing into our next planned trip downtown so it doesn’t take us by surprise. Vancouver, after all, is a city where you have to consider these types of things once you know they exist.