When I called the Fredericton hostel to make a reservation for a room a surly man on the other end of the line simply asked my name, snorted “Yeah, okay” and hung up. This was the least amount of information I’d ever had to give to secure accommodations and it made me a uneasy. I had made the reservations in a bus terminal in Quebec City after a weekend of enjoying the IIHF hockey tournament and drinking inside an indoor go-karting track. The colourful excitement of an international celebration in an exotic looking city was contrasted in the beige Fredericton hostel. At the front desk I found a grumpy nerd in a hospital gown who was the owner of the voice on the phone. He gruffly ran over the rules with me explaining that it was essentially dormitory for University students, not the sort of establishment that entertained sauced Australians with board games. “No visitors. You can show up drunk if you’re quiet, but honestly if you can find a way to have a good time here on a Monday I’d be surprised.”

The room was small with damage from an brown stain on the ceiling. It was furnished with a cot like bed, a desk and a working sink. This last feature was initially viewed as a perk until I realized that the closest bathroom was seven doors down the hallway. Under certain circumstances a bedside sink is just begging to be urinated into in the middle of the night. And if I thought of it, then somebody else already did it, meaning I will brush elsewhere,

Unlike other hostels where people asked me where I was from, people here asked me what I was studying. There was a common area occupied by a middle aged man watching television. He was laughing pretty hard at the commercials and I guessed he wasn’t a student. His gray hair was cut into a mullet shape, but curly and puffy. An unemployable hair style that says “I’m a rebel slob who doesn’t fit into narrow definitions of humanity.” John was from Ontario and he lived off of disability for an eyesight problem he didn’t go into detail about, but he did have creepy sunken in right eyeball with a glossy failing pupil. He’d lived at the hostel for several weeks and was stalling over a decision to ride his bicycle several hundred miles to the south to catch a ferry to Nova Scotia. He’d ventured to eastward to New Brunswick in the first place because the province offered better odds on their scratch and win lotto tickets. But failing to hit it big he thought maybe it was time to move onward. When I said I was from the West Coast he told me he’d lived outside in Victoria near some railroad tracks for many months. John lived a simplistic life people who’ve never been caught out in the cold fantasize about living. Despite my best efforts to make him like a bucket of life experience, he was painfully dull to converse with. He was the Monday night in Fredericton of small talk.

At the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton the showcase piece is a four metre tall Salvador Dali entitled “Santiago El Grande” It features an ocean landscape held together by arches and scallop shells, a stallion ridden by a glowing angelic man who’s holding in his palm a Jesus on the cross hovering in energy. I looked at the Dali for a while the turned and the painting on the wall behind me was eight square feet of nazi homo-eroticism. Life-sized gay skinhead factory workers bathing each other after a hard days work. A kindly gentleman employee of the gallery approached me with his hands folded behind his back

“I see you’ve noticed the Attila Richard Lukacs.” he cooed in a soft voice. “Notice that every gay fetish is represented, including bondage over here… See the tattoo that reads SS BUM BOY on his lower thigh? This submissive little fellow is the catcher.” It should be noted that at all the art galleries and museums I’d visited employees strolled past me in disgust as if my body heat was responsible for the slow erosion of the artifacts. Suddenly this man was volunteering to describe every brush stroke of this intentionally shocking painting. This might sound like a man hitting on me except there wasn’t anything sexual about his tone either. He spoke with the same emotionlessness as a TV weatherman rambling through temperature conversions. I suspect making people uncomfortable around this painting was just what this guy did for kicks over the course of a long and dull work day in the gallery lobby. And if that is the case I applaud him for it. I’ve had to sit through so many self-proclaimed “shocking and dirty” stand up comedians who are bland as cold oatmeal.

Now after the Salvador Dali and the excitement of the Attila Richard Lukacs the rest of the gallery really looked like crap in comparison. I was yawning at some charcoal drawings of angels wondering, “Where’s the swastika tattoos?” When a loose skinned old man shuffled into the same room. His face was dotted with the stains of a life that should have mercifully ended decades prior. His every movement was a laboured grapple against gravity. He had a scraggly unkempt beard and if it weren’t for the fact he was wearing a floral grandpa sweater I would have assumed he was homeless (the fact he had paid a $12 admission was a bit of a tip off too). He looked at the charcoal drawings for a few moments before his head snapped up like he was being called from the other room to let him know that his grave was finally ready and then he shuffled back out. A few seconds later the chatterbox from the lobby excitedly hurried into the room where I was standing. What could this be about then? The drawings were so boring, what was he going to say to spruce up the viewing experience? Maybe each one was drawn by an elephant on crystal meth in under five seconds?

“That gentlemen who was just in here was Joseph Plaskett!” he chimed. He brought me up to speed that this painter was celebrating his 90th birthday by touring his artworks across Canada. Yet this wasn’t the gallery where his exhibition was being held. The man probably got disoriented and blindly roamed the streets until attracted by the familiar scents of paint and canvass

The chatty gallery staffer continued “I when you came in here you had no idea you’d be rubbing elbows with a minor celebrity, huh?” This was true, I hadn’t. And I’m not entirely sure that I did either. If you’re alone in a room with a famous person, but you don’t know who they are, were they really famous at all? If you don’t recognize a recognizable person are they really any different then a complete stranger?

I bought from a bookstore called “The Rebel Sell: why culture can’t be jammed” It is a counter counter-culture book featuring the picture of Che Guevara on disposable coffee cup. Since I had a private room and a desk I spent the rest of my time in Fredericton reading it in depth. The concepts were muddled, many a strawman was built up and torn down, but what I took away from it was the idea of anti-consumerism counter-culture actually strengthens the mainstream culture rather then weaken it because mainstream culture just assimilates anything cool and makes it into what it wants. I thought of the anti-establishment technology rejecting wanderings of probable jackass Chris McCandless (long dead). His story was originally told in an interesting non-fiction title “Into the Wild”. Then it was eventually bought up by Paramount studios, turned into a major motion picture starring Speed Racer as the tragic lead, directed by an award starved celebrity who was once married to Madonna, included an original soundtrack by a former grunge rocker/ripped jeans pitch man that made it up to 11 on the billboard charts, and is available on state-of-the-art blu-ray at the price of $29.99 on Amazon.com.

It gave me fear that if I was to die in Fredericton by slipping in the communal showers and falling naked out of a third story window that the notes from this journal might become the basis of a slapstick straight to video release staring Jimmy Fallon in the role of me. It would climax with a scene in which John from Ontario (played by Screech from “Saved by the Bell”) would discover my corpse outside with my face smashed comically in my crotch and declare “Ben said he wanted to get some head last night, but this is ridiculous!” Then an original song by Weird Al Yankovich would play and everybody would feel ripped off by the events of my life no matter what coupon they used to buy it.