i may burn this all down if gas goes below fifty cents

I was in Vancouver this past week visiting friends and have two pieces of advice.  First, Excellent Sushi downtown on Granville St.  22 rolls for five dollars.  Secondly, go to Uncle Fatih's Pizza right outside the Commercial drive Skytrain station and order a slice of potato pizza.  It'll change your life.

I've also revised some of my opinion on buying used.  While I still love the idea, I've decided it's more ethical to buy DIY goods new.  By DIY I mean a t-shirt/record from the band who are struggling to eat while on tour or a lovingly crafted piece of art or zine (not that anyone charges for zines).  The whole point of buying used is to not buy (ha, ha) into the corporate mentality--the consumer treadmill I talked about in my last post, and I feel a good way to resist that is to support those who are trying to do what they love outside of the corporate mainstream.

This have gotten me thinking quite a bit about what I buy into on a daily basis.  As most of you know, I consider myself in subculture of hardcore, but what does that mean?  Most of my close friends are punk/hardcore types, I go to shows, listen to the music, consider and discuss ideas that come out of hardcore,  have ideas about what my subculture should look like--all sorts of neat stuff.

But I still am sitting in my house in Edmonton.  I'm still a privileged Northern citizen with a car (well, kind of) and disposable income.  More importantly, I participate in this culture.  The question one of my Vancouver friends raised is: why should I?  

Why should I count myself as part of a culture that tells me that I have to be rich to be happy?  That tells me that I'm somehow better because I'm male and white, somehow worse because I'm young?  Why should I bother with something that wants me to beg at the feet of politicians for any real change?  That tries to make me profit off the backs of third world labourers all while dulling my brain on cotton candy entertainment?  Why should I let this culture take my power away?

In the UBBT we talk a lot about changing the world.  I think I've got a different view on it, that too many are settled with the way things are and we aren't going to wake enough of them up.  In order to truly change the world there would have to be such massive economic and class restructuring that we would lose the lives we're used to.  And we're comfortable with the power structure, because the middle class of North America or Europe are pretty near to the top.  At some point we sold our true power as individuals for the shirts in our closets and the trappings of a modern life, for some, are too good to give up.

But a subculture (in the real sense, not the I shop at Hot Topic because no one understands me sense) can let me help create a space away from the mainstream where I do have power as an individual.  That's what I want: for people to reject the mainstream and recreate the world as they wish.  For example, I don't think racism can ever really be overcome--despite the colour of a president's skin.  There are still many racist individuals and institutions out there.  The best thing would be to change their minds--I doubt that'll happen.  In my view, they can just go off and be racist by themselves, if they wish to act like that then they aren't welcome in the culture I want. 

Now you all don't have to go about this as angrily as I am.  You can, of course--a good way to start some sort of rude gesture at a Wal-Mart.  Anyway, the subculture of martial artists has great power to redefine our worlds.  The UBBT is perfect for this, especially because self-improvement is a key step in this process.  But please, my fellow UBBT team members, recognize that a big chunk of our society is against us in this endeavor of changing the world, that our culture is in fact built to resist any positive change.  So instead maybe we should kind of start fresh, while encouraging people to do the same.  Let's take our power, starting with the power we hold over ourselves. 

Writing this got me pretty worked up but I have to go back to studying latin.  Get ready for some super intense verb conjugations!