Last week, I moved back to Vancouver and into a neighbourhood in which I have spent little time since the 1980s. Back then, I spent a lot of time in the area centred on Memorial Park in the swath of then-working class homes between the city’s main cemetery and its second Little India because my friends Oscar and Terence lived here.
In 1987, Oscar had the first of a series of prophetic dreams that my friends and I attempted to use in our nascent political organizing. For many years, I have thought of this effort to integrate these dreams into our political thought as an adolescent practice we grew out of. But today, I am not so sure. In fact, I have come to believe that Oscar’s first oracular dream basically summarizes most of my experience of political organizing over the past thirty-five years.
So, now that I have an up-to-date photo of the Church’s Fried Chicken franchise that has, amazingly, survived the onslaught of gentrification that has destroyed nearly every fun commercial strip in this city, I thought I would share the dream.
The dream begins with Oscar driving a pickup truck up Fraser Street from the south when he begins to hear something moving around in the back of the truck. He pulls into the Church’s parking lot and gets out to take a look and discovers a half-dozen corpses in the back, whereupon, unbidden by his conscious mind, he takes a hypodermic needle out of his pocket. It is already full of Windex, which he injects into one of the corpses.
Immediately, it springs to life as some sort of contagious zombie and animates the other corpses. They run down Fraser Street and spread the contagion to the other pedestrians. Terrified, Oscar retreats across the parking lot to the northeast to survey the ghastly scene.
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Desperate to deal with the worsening zombie situation, he and Oscar rush over to the outhouse and begin pulling up the floorboards with their bare hands. And then Oscar catches himself and stands up. The man in the trench coat is still furiously pulling up the floorboards and angrily muttering.
“Maybe he’s sick too,” Oscar decides and abandons the outhouse. He goes to the bus shelter on 41st Avenue where the local transit map is conveniently refreshing every few minutes to show the progress of the zombie infestation, which has now taken over pretty much the entire region except for the town of Squamish to the sorth. A woman with a bunch of kids pulls up in her car and offers Oscar a ride.
The dream ends.
And no, I won’t be offering an analysis of the dream here or anywhere else. Now, back to regular blog posts.
Rest in Peace Oscar Bot, 1971-2014, true friend and comrade.
