Attention residents of Orange County and surrounding counties! I've managed to worm my way onto the bill of a very interesting reading series, The Writer's Garage, run by the legendary Mike Martt of Thelonius Monster. The idea here is to mix reading and punk-rock, something I've been trying to do for years with little success. I'm appearing next Wednesday night, September 13, at DiPiazza's Lava Lounge in Long Beach. Also on the bill: Mike Watt of the Minutemen and Kira Roessler from Black Flag. I'm sure they'll never have seen the likes of me. Maybe Watt can say hello to Iggy Pop for me when he plays with him in Buenos Aires about a week later. Talk about range! Anyway, it's 5 bucks, I'll be reading at 8 PM and will be reading from Alternadad. Come by and exchange pleasantries.

Now I'll tell my final vacation story, I promise.

One of the first things I do when I take a holiday, even when I'm travelling with family and especially when I know that I'm not going to have to drive, and especially especially in a place with relaxed attitudes toward drug use, is to seek out a small bag of marijuana for my personal use. And I wasn't going to visit Vancouver without scoring me some legendary BC bud. So the first night we were there, after we got Elijah to sleep on the sofabed, I headed off to the 300 block of West Hastings Street, which everyone who reads certain Internet forums knows is the best place in Vancouver for tourists to buy weed.

My first stop was the New Amsterdam Cafe, where they do not, like in Amsterdam, sell weed. However, they do allow frat boys, hippies, Australians, and their girlfriends to roll blunts and smoke them, as long as they buy at least two dollars worth of nonalcoholic drinks. The guy behind the counter told me that I should walk around the block to buy at a cafe or a shop. Do not buy on the street, he warned me.

As soon as I walked out the door, two bike-riding extras from a Gus Van Sant movie rode up, flanking me on either side, asking me if I wanted to buy weed. Despite the advice I'd just received, I said, "Sure! I'm from L.A.! We love weed!"

One of them, the one further along in his heroin addiction, shoved a bag of what was definitely not weed in my face. I turned him down. The other guy handed me a bag of what also wasn't weed, and started demanding 40 bucks from me. I said no. We walked straight into a huge dark-skinned dude wearing a white two-piece tracksuit and gold chains, who assured me that he wasn't a crackhead.

As they vied for my business, I turned tail down the street, thinking, I'm a dad. What the fuck am I doing here? But then again, this is a pretty entertaining thing for a dad to do, as long as he doesn't get shot. But no one gets shot in Canada, right? In the midst of those deep ruminations, I came upon a bar loaded with beer-drinking college students. I fell into conversation with a man with a hook for a left hand, and a change-collecting Starbucks cup in the other.

He told me his life's story: He was a boilermaker. His wife walked out on him, along with his daughter. I suspected that she may have had probable cause, but he was still obviously sad. Apparently, divorce and child support is expensive in Canada, because he lost everything and now he was a drug addict who lives on an upper floor of a skid-row residential hotel.

"What a drag," I said.

"So," he said. "Are you looking for some weed?"

As I dropped a couple of loonies in his cup, he told me to go wait over by the jukebox. Someone would come get me and take me into a back room. There, I would find "the man", who had several different varietals for sale. All this happened, and I came out with a pinch of sativa for a reasonable price. I thanked the one-handed boilermaker, slid him a couple more loonies, and went back to the New Amsterdam.

Three nights and two visits to Hastings Street later, I found myself in conversation with a couple of locals and a bunch of dumb guys from Switzerland. The locals told me that they feel sorry for Americans who visit Canada, because those who do, for the most part, are just trying to escape from the crushing daily realities of low-level fascism. I couldn't deny them their analysis; when the morning newspaper at your hotel features a front-page story about a film-festival docudrama that depicts the assassination of the current President, you know you're in a different country.

"Still," I said. "You've got to have some problems here, too."

"Oh yah," said one of them, a sculptor, with all apparent seriousness. "All these new skyscrapers downtown, those copper roofs are turning green."

The other said, "They're having to pour horse piss on them to turn them copper again."

"You're kidding," I said.

"It's a real problem," said the sculptor.

He passed me a joint, and I took a puff, trying to forget that tomorrow, it was back to the land of phone-tapping and secret torture prisons. Then again, West Hollywood is only a 30-minute drive away.

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