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Vancouver: After the Crash

Posted by Sean / August 29, 2008

It is summer 2009, after the September Riots. Vancouver has just been destroyed by an earthquake, and is now an island. VANOC claims the Olympics will go ahead, despite heavy damage to venues. International aid is sparse as the world deals with the collapse of the American Economy, triggered by the assassination of its first black president whose economic isolationism caused China to sell off its Treasury Bonds.

Someday your steps will become crowded
Your angles shaved down
Your steel grip loosened by curious roots
Massive meeting halls made from the remnants of stadiums
Wrought-iron twisted into playful shapes
Rain-water collecting purposefully amongst the rubble
Families huddled under the ominous green-glass glow of empty condos
The tyranny of geometry ignored by gangs of wild children
Carrying new flags, new dreams, swinging wildly on loose-ends
Spitting at passers-by

Gardens soften the soil where rigid forms once crushed the regolith
Tomatoes grow exhausted under the windshields of wrecked cars
Pull the paint from the wood, lay down with the coloured stakes

We sail on makeshift Gondolas down city streets
And take a minute to remember Venice
Past fences where food-lines stretch
Our hair's grown wild and well-oiled
Crowning the backs of our soft skulls
With ultraviolet halos.

Gangplanks stretch across murky sloughs
Ad-hoc boardwalks clamber across the shells of broken homes
New maps, new tomes.
Living at last those dreams dreamt up by HP Lovecraft
Half-awake and hungry
Violent rays of incandescent light stab downward into
The dark, velvet, underground.

Rusted red dumpsters turned on their side
Line the high water mark
The ocean is everywhere
Salt lines creep like capillaries
Up brick and coloured concrete
Creosote rafts and reclaimed post and beam wharves
Pilings made from telegraph poles
Everything is running on gas again
Its exciting to live again

The empty city stretches out like a campus in August
Heaving with urgency, ready to beckon the calvary
Basking in the neon-glow of future fires.

Discussion

13 Comments

Tinka Tinka Tonk said:

WTF?

Get a life!

This explains why Vancouver is the way it is.
Bitch & Moan yet wait for others to make the first move.

Jebus said:

pray for war

Jon said:

Good stuff, Sean.

Nice words & some beautiful photography... keep up the good work.

jerry Incognito said:

hah ha - that's great..

you should check out "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman
.. is a good docu-sci-fi

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/


Jon said:

Agreed - Weisman's book is a great read. I still think about armadillos the size of VW Beetles traipsing around America on, like, a weekly basis thanks to that one.

But how bad was that Will Smith film, eh?

Just re-watched Don McKellar's 'Last Night', and have to highly recommend that one in terms of doomsday films... a Canadian classic.

dave said:

these photos are outstanding, sean.

sean Orr said:

I like 'Songs From the Second Floor', and 'Delicatessen'.

hi guys said:

Dare to dream, 20-something malcontents. Dare to dream.

sean Orr said:


hi guys:

Dare to dream, 20-something malcontents. Dare to dream.


Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who are you calling 20-something?

Sarah Blyth said:

I love your photos Sean...

fabian said:


sean Orr:

I like 'Songs From the Second Floor', and 'Delicatessen'.


Yeah, pretty much everything from Jeunet+Carot is awesome.

Kerr said:

Could you help me. People fail forward to success. Help me! Need information about: Nurse bachelor degree. I found only this - nurses bachelor or associates degree. There are even websites that offer online bachelor degrees for just a few hundred dollars which can be ordered and received within days. Grantham university launches new bachelor degree in accounting. With respect :confused:, Kerr from Japan.

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