Rainy Day Pudding Rage

How high is the water Mama? Five feet high and rising. Yesterday was wet in Vancouver. The average annual rainfall is about 150 c/m, or 60 inches, or five feet of rain. What follows this never ending rain is not spoken about in polite society, but after a certain amount of rain, people go crazy. “When is it ever going to stop” is a frequent cry, and complaining about the weather in Vancouver is legendary. In the late Nineties, actor David Duchovny was banned from his favourite strip club for publicly complaining about “400 inches of rain”. Now that is clearly an exaggeration, and Mr. Duchovny may have issues with adding inches.

“Rainy days and Mondays always bring me down” mashes up with I Don’t Like Mondays, and we remark on the similarities between Bob Geldof and Duchovny, who are both famous assholes, but it’s not a contest, is it? Or is it?

Rain and in particular the never ending relentless variant is known to cause to depression and sadness. There is an acceptable relationship between low serotonin levels and lack of sunshine, and these abominable combos also contribute to cravings for comfort foods, as carbs boost serotonin levels.

This tsunami of emotions and weather explains how I found myself running around to various stores looking for Chocolate pudding, in particular, Kozy Shack. I found their original tapioca pudding and their rice pudding, and while I like both of them, the craving was definitely for chocolate pudding. It appears that the people behind the Kozy Shack are not serious people, and they may have made a stupid and culturally insensitive decision to discontinue chocolate pudding. This has yet to be double verified.

I’m not the first person to submit to a craving for chocolate pudding. Remember Barry Egan in Punch Drunk Love, which was influenced by the real life story of David Phillips, also known as The Pudding Cup Man? Phillips found a loophole in a Healthy Choice pudding cup deal, and amassed over 1.25 million miles after buying 12,150 cups, which cost him just $3,000. My pudding fascination is more modest. I really only wanted a tub of Kozy Shack.

The first store I went to was Buy Low located in Kingsgate Mall. Kingsgate Mall is famous for having its own song. Anyway, no luck at Buy Low, which is undergoing some kind of corporate change, so recently the shelves have all been changed. I went to four employees before I found someone who knew what Kozy Shack was.

Like the famous chicken, I then crossed the road to check out Nesters, another store. Both stores are owned by the same parent company, the Jim Pattison Group. Jim Pattison started out years ago as a car salesman, and is now a billionaire resembling Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. I’ve heard he likes to dress shabbily, then frequent McDonalds, where he orders something, then fumbles around for his change, until the guy behind him gets fed up, and mistakes him for a homeless person and buys him a free lunch. Billionaires. Can’t take them anywhere.

No luck at Nester’s, so I cross Kingsway at the crosswalk to head back to the Buy Low parking lot. Once again, it is rainy day. There are about 20 people crossing the street. A white SUV is in the crosswalk, and continues to creep forward into the oncoming human traffic. Someone yells at him to stop, but he continues to edge forwards. I pound on his hood and yell at him.

Now pounding on someone’s hood is definitely fighting words. He rolls down his window, and I further shout at him to stop, caught up in my rainy day pudding rage. He says he is getting ready to turn left. Now getting ready to turn left on a red light does not in any way justify driving through pedestrians on a crosswalk. I yell some more, then look at my fellow cross crosswalkers for approval. This guy is the epitome of privileged asshole, and of course the SUV is a BMW, which is still the gold standard for asshole drivers, although Tesla drivers are gaining momentum.

I never did find the chocolate pudding, instead settling for tapioca pudding along with milk chocolate ice cream. Please note that there is no plan to mix these two together to create a new superfood, like I once did after a show, buying a hot dog on the street, then buying a slice of pepperoni pizza, discarding the bun, and wrapping the pizza slice around the hot dog. It was fabulously disgusting, and may offer clues as to why I’ve had a triple bypass and throat cancer, although scientists have yet to do a peer reviewed double blind study in the Lancet. Until that happens, I am happy to soak in my pudding rage in the rain.