Summer to-dos

Holy crap. Summer is here and Montreal, that once quiet, lumbering, creepy winter hermit, has awakened into the kind of party animal that walks into the town bar wearing a taxidermied deer face as a hat and doing the hamster-dance while crushing beer cans on its boner. Yes, Montreal is in full swing. And while there are a lot of things that make me really cringe about this city in the summer (mostly those guys who believe that because they put $1,000 into neon lighting under their shitty Honda Civics, it gives them the right to drive down Ste-Catherine calling random females “bitch” if they don’t acknowledge their amazing hotness), I have learned to embrace all the crappiness as par for the course.

At this point in the season, most people are too stunned from the nice weather to even notice how kind of gross things are. Do we really have time to notice how people with the loudest sound systems in their cars often have the worst taste in music? No. Because we are drunk and wandering from a terrasse to a bar to a house party to an alley to throw up. Are we too distracted by the constant flow of hot people on the street to notice how corny the graffiti is around town? Yes. Are we completely oblivious to the weird smells that start emanating from the alleyways this time of year and how the construction and bad traffic make this city seem like a war zone dipped in barf? Yes, because we are too busy taking part in the time-honoured Montreal tradition of drinking in the park and taking long walks for ice cream and weed.

This brings me to something I like to call My Summer To-Do list. It’s a little checklist I like to outline at the beginning of the city’s hot times full of things that I feel are necessary for the Montreal summer to be complete. Here’s the list so far:

Rent some Bixis for an impromptu drunken demolition derby.

Dress up in a Norwegian black metal outfit one Sunday and try to start a mosh pit with the foam-sword medievalists on the mountain.

Go tanning with sunscreen only on my arms, face and neck to see what a reverse-farmer-tan looks like.

Visit a Quebec county fair to walk up to the Milk Judging Competition and loudly proclaim with disappointment that I thought it was a MILF Judging Competition.

Go to La Ronde on some sort of mild hallucinogen and lose my mind/lunch on the log ride.

Break into a public pool in a fancy neighbourhood after closing.

Run from the cops.

Actually, #6 and #7 I sort of checked off last weekend. Except they were a single incident. And I didn’t exactly run. Rather, I and six other drunken people huddled in the corner of the pool in the hopes that the cops would not see us. Which obviously didn’t work. We then considered going to the centre of the pool, which one person suggested would end up in a stalemate with the authorities on the edges and us in the middle, untouchable. In the end, we just hopped back over the fence and luckily most of us managed to get out of giving up our IDs and getting any sort of ticket. I’m thinking it might have been my confusing tactic of talking to the police officer soaking wet in nothing but biker boots and boxer shorts and then telling him I was a New Yorker named Artemio who didn’t know the rules here in Canada. He was kind enough to let us go with the parting comment, “Hey Artemio, you look like a Chippendale.”

But doing something like getting caught by the cops looking like a mentally deranged male stripper or bruising your foot and cutting your legs jumping a fence to have five minutes in a freezing cold pool are the kind of stupid risks we take in the Montreal summer. The heat gets to our heads. We feel that not only can we get away with anything, we should get away with anything. After all, we survived another Montreal winter. We deserve it.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA