Last night on our way to pick up Oscar, Ed and I were pulled over by the police.

Okay, that sounds rather tame. Let me add some words, drama it up a little:

Last night, Ed and I were pulled over by the police at Hastings and Main.

I know what you’re thinking. What could Ed and Kimli, the tamest and least-illegal people on the face of the internet, possibly have done to warrant being stopped by the police in what is quite literally and without exaggeration ground-fucking-zero of Vancouver’s mean streets? An area so bad that Dan Rather himself came up to do an exposé of the city’s notorious drug problem in a little slice of hell affectionately reported as “Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is the poorest neighborhood in British Columbia – in all of Canada, for that matter. No other slum or ghetto in the country matches the squalor of this 10-block urban wasteland, with its rundown hotels and pawn shops, stained and fractured sidewalks, gutters and alleyways littered with garbage, used condoms and discarded hypodermic needles.” in media around the world? Did we get caught buying heroin or meth? Shoot up in plain view on the sidewalk? Attempt to hock some stolen wares for a few dollars which we would immediately turn into our next fix? Did I sell my wasted body on the streets for drugs, knowing there’s an increasingly real and terrifying risk that I’d disappear into the night and never be seen again? Did we assault people on the sidewalk? Panhandle aggressively, chasing after people who ignore us while swearing and frothing at the mouth? Did Ed piss against a building in plain sight of the shocked tourists who wandered a little too far outside Gastown on their search for the Steam Clock? Did I wander into traffic while muttering to myself, clearly out of my mind with the remnants of last night’s bender still visible on my filthy clothes?

None of these, actually. Last night, Ed and I were pulled over by the police at Hastings and Main because our car has tinted windows.

I am trying very hard to see this from the law enforcement’s point of view and figure out why, in the very epicenter of Vancouver’s crime-infested and shockingly desperate Skid Row, it was necessary to stop US while ignoring everything else going on.

The nearest I can figure: we were the only thing in that area the cop had any control over. Hastings and Main is so hopeless, I imagine it would be easier to tackle something you could have some semblance of power over rather than try, yet again, to stop people from smoking crack on the sidewalk or pleading with them to use the bins for their used needles instead of leaving them where people step on them or worse – pick them up to use again later. From this angle, I suppose it makes sense. Telling us that we were a danger to people around us a mere minute after Ed had to roll up my passenger side window to stop a homeless man from coming over and harassing me for money must have made perfect sense, somewhere.

With North Shore hipsters like us on the loose, I can see why the city is paralyzed with fear.