Now, it’s late February 2001, and I’ve found myself back in Vancouver. Pretty exhausted — grateful for the assistance of friends that have made my homeless life possible, but tired of depending on people for shelter and food, and never having my own private place to generate new writing or music. I go out to clubs, not because I want to, but because I have to hang around until the person I’m staying with also goes home.
I waited for my friend to get down to this club, where we ended up standing about 3 hours in line to see a show by the world famous DJ Qbert from San Francisco, and then failed to even get into the show.
My friend explained the story of Qbert to me. Apparently, this guy was in some kind of accident, and was immobile for an extended period of time, and spent most of that time on the turntables. Now, he walks around with a cane, but he’s now in a class of his own amongst DJs. He won the DMC world DJ championships several years straight, until he was asked not to compete anymore.
And so now, I’m going around Vancouver collecting my stuff, trying to figure out what I’ll do with it. Yesterday, I picked up 4 boxes from my friend’s place — 4 boxes of nothing that I’ll ever need in the future. There was a filing cabinet full of press releases of albums that came out years ago. There was a grey wooden box that I’d remembered to contain personal matters, like pictures and letters, but I found it empty. And there were 2 boxes of 8-tracks — the remnants of an easy listening collection dating back to the 1960s — which I paid way too much money for. I’ll probably give the 8-tracks away, and if I’m ever looking for the samples, I’m sure there’s some internet radio station where I can find this stuff. Anyway, there’s never going to be an end of flea markets with Ray Coniff records selling for $1.