Pinko Magazine Hedonism + Activism

Have you ever been to Vancouver? I have. It’s stunning and it looks like the future. Three years ago I went to a dinner there at the University of British Columbia demonstration farm: we ate at long tables with white table cloths in the middle of a corn field overlooking the Pacific, feasting on a buffet of local food and organic wine. Later that night a major figure in the sustainability movement sent me down to the beach to buy her some pot, which I did with panache from a strange naked man. I stayed in a downtown hostel and my roommate was an Australian underwear model named Valentino and I loved him, for a night. It was good.

This morning I read the disturbing news that Vancouver is becoming known for something else: a rash of dismembered, bodyless feet washing up on the beach. All of them are RIGHT feet, with no sign of the left. The New York Times, in one of the strangest articles I’ve ever read, detailed the landing spots of the three limbs and postulates three possible theories:

1. Gang members in Seattle or Vancouver took the feet, stripped them of their desirable jogging shoes, then cast them into the ocean. (The Clinton campaign immediately accused Barack Obama.)

2. A mischievous morgue employee is dumping them as a joke. Uhm, ha? I don’t know.

3. The right feet belong to four men who’s plane disappeared last summer over the ocean. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an expert in tracking the routes of floating objects, offered simply that the left feet had “aggregated somewhere else.”

There’s also a theory about an axe-wielding, cave-bound foot fetishist, who I have concluded is also the man that sold me pot on the beach in mid-2005. Daniel Day Lewis is not a suspect. Lastly, there is some swooning over how big the foot was (size 12 … rawr) from a British Columbian wine importer.

At Pinko, we can’t begin to offer any theories about how we dismembered three people on the beach on that warm Spring night in 2005. We don’t know anything about that. We’re most excited about Curtis Ebbesmeyer who has the coolest job e-ver. To repeat, his job is to track the routes of floating objects all day. He is particularly experienced at studying the buoyancy of sneakers, and is also an expert in … the giant pacific floating trash heap, where we assume the left feet have “aggregated” and are now decomposing in a swill of plastic bottles, rubber duckies and hockey equipment. In any case you should still go to Vancouver, particularly for a day of biking in the park. But be careful on the beach …

About The Author - Ben Wyskida is a writer, activist, conscientious hedonist and political communications strategist living in Brooklyn. - Visit Ben's site.