A St-Jean Facebook story

by RAF KATIGBAK

I can’t put my finger on it, but there was something kind of weird about my St-Jean Baptiste. I mean, the day started out in a rather customary Sunday fashion: wake up late, have a delicious brunch at my favourite greasy spoon, hit the park for a rousing, drunken game of croquet, then a picnic on the mountain where teams of cops would walk by every 30 seconds telling me that my glass Perrier bottle was an infraction of city ordinance 305-B.6, then after dinner, head over to a gathering under a dilapidated overpass on the cusp of Little Italy where a van with a DJ set hooked up to a generator blasted dancehall, dirty hip hop and distorted shout-outs to hundreds of sweaty, writhing, drunken youth; you know, the usual.

What’s so strange about that? Was it because I spent the day both delirious from my strange naked rollercoaster dream of the night before and completely wasted on a mix of Cheval Blanc, Jägermeister and some mysterious psychedelic aquamarine serum that a friend had smuggled back from Europe in a Scope bottle?

It couldn’t have been that underpass party (dubbed Bridge Burner St-Jean by the organizers), could it? Okay, sure, it felt like a cross between some kind of post-apocalyptic Mad Max Thunderdome and that painful rave cave scene from the third Matrix movie, with a crowd from some socialist Mile-End experimental symphonic post-rock dub gamelan concert.

Was it because the cops were there, and not breaking it up? Nah. That only made sense. After all, if they had busted it early, they would have to deal with hundreds of disaffected hipsters roaming the streets with nothing to do but look disaffected. Total bummer. I’m sure they figured having a bunch of kids writhing barefoot in the streets like some kind of hippie interpretive dance collective is easier to deal with than drunken louts smashing things. Given the state of disrepair of Montreal’s overpasses, maybe they just figured the whole thing would have collapsed on us eventually.

Oh wait; maybe it was because at that party I saw everyone I had ever met in Montreal, literally. Everyone. I had ever met. In Montreal. EVER. Elementary school alumni who had since gained a few pounds and had once dreamt of becoming an astronaut only to finally settle for being regional mid-level management at a signage company. Old roommates who reportedly had to make an emergency move back to Kentucky to visit their ailing mothers and so had to break the lease and skip out on that month’s rent but had actually just moved to NDG to be with his girlfriend and start a makeshift meth lab. Old high school bandmates who had since left their dreams of rock stardom behind for a secure life of babies and condos in Toronto. Ex-girlfriends, and their larger, more successful boyfriends who had made them my ex-girlfriends. Everyone was there.

There’s an unsettling Twilight Zone-ish feeling that happens when you see everyone from your past congregate in the same place, be it on an online networking Web site or the same outdoor ghetto rave. I can’t really explain it. It was as if I had died, and the higher power above decided to have a This Is Your Life-style intervention featuring all the players that had ever been weird to me, reliving the good old days to the sound of digitally distorted Southern crunk music.

I shivered when I overheard a young teenage girl giggle, “It’s like Facebook here!” Partially because it was scary, mostly because it was true.

Maybe I was just paranoid because there were so many cops around. Maybe it’s because it felt like, if things were in slow motion, it could have been a beer commercial. Then again, maybe it was just that mystic, aquamarine psychedelic serum that is, right now, still making me hallucinate small impish creatures who want to dance on my kitchen counter and throw ping pong balls at me. Maybe that little magical gnome riding that rainbow unicorn over there can explain it to me...

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca