This is the Sea

I'm guessing everyone has at some point in their life looked around themselves and wondered, "How did I get here?" We know David Byrne has, or at least we can assume so based on the 1980 Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime.

Sidebar: That song is from 1980? Like, 45-years-ago-1980? Having spent 25 years saying, "The date is twenty-something", now, "1980" sounds more like saying, "1880". Yet, the 1980s are also ever present in my mind, especially with the current wave of conservative governments in the States and Europe. Later in the 80s, as a teen, it was very common to think Mulroney, Reagan and Thatcher were the stuff creepy European folktales were made of. They would seem sweetly naive by today’s conservative standards. Well, maybe not Thatcher (shiver). It is funny to think nostalgically of a time when we wondered if we were running out of tomorrows. These days it’s very common to believe democracy is in its death throes. Some are protesting it, some are trying to ignore it, some are fighting it, but unfortunately, quite a few are profiting from it. Is that how the mind works? Yesterdays are for nostalgia and tomorrows are for hope and fears?

This brings me back to my point (I just knew I’d get there eventually): sometimes you have to look around and wonder “How did I get here?” Sometimes in your life, a change happens and you don’t realize it. Other times a change happens and your world shakes and you know it’s important and even if it took you by surprise it feels inevitable. When Robert Frost wrote The Road Not Taken, was he thinking that his choices made his life, or that we fool ourselves by thinking that our choices make our lives as they turn out to be? Do we even have free will? Does it even matter?

Read more »

A Most Useless Rain

When it is boiling hot, you don't really expect steam, until you do. The temperatures in Toronto have been at a steady roast for the last week. My thermometer outside my home office window is in the shade and has been stuck around 33ºC, with humidity at gross percent, the "feels like" numbers are more like 40-42º (around 105ºF). There hadn't been rain in a dog's age, but even a faint possibility was full of promise.

I stepped out onto Bay Street into a haze that had me sweating only seconds after leaving the confines of the atmospherically controlled office tower. I was desperate for a chocolate soft serve (custard cone to Newfoundlanders), which a van parked across the street sold. Side note: how has the cost of a small soft serve cone doubled in four years? Has ice cream pricing started to parallel real estate prices? It had been quietly raining, but the drops seemed to steam off upon touching the radiant asphalt. The streets were wet for perhaps a minute before they simply went dry. It was a bit strange to see wet pavement dry before your eyes, as though the wet was being sucked through the street. In reality, it was floating off, not soaking through. The rain hadn't made a dent in the temperature. If anything, the air felt thicker. In Newfoundland, a warm, but damp day, when it's humid yet foggy, is referred to as "mauzy". I can't say it was something you'd get every year in St. John's. Because everyone seemed to refer to August as the dog days of summer, as a kid, I assumed it had something to do with its closeness, its humidity, like the smell of a warm, wet dog. Humidity always seemed surprising to me in St. John's, as though a place so near the North Atlantic was caught off guard by it. In Toronto, humidity is effectively a default setting. Most of the city feels like a dank basement for weeks at a time. In this current heat wall (a heat wave sounds too pleasant. A heat wall slams you the second you step into it), the rain has no impact on temperature. There is no relief. It's like stepping from a sauna into a hot shower. This combination of heat, humidity and drizzle is the closest I've had to that mauzy feeling half-remembered from summers in my youth.

By the time I had ascended back up the 28 floors to my desk, what was a drizzle had become a squall, with rain streaking sideways and splattering against the windows of the office. Briefly, colours popped back to life. Greens were dark and fresh as produce, while reds shone out and yellows practically glowed. Then the rain stopped. The temperature was unchanged. The humidity had no doubt risen, and the city returned to its sallow grey.

Riparian Diversions

Now I lay me down in green pastures, but preferably the ones near rivers. Image by Midjourney.

Humans are terrestrial creatures, but inexplicably are drawn to water. Maybe it's not that inexplicable. We do need water to live. Aren't we mostly made up of the stuff? I often attribute it to my island upbringing for my fascination with water, but it isn't necessarily true. So many days I've started a bike ride with no intentions to go anywhere but still find myself drawn out to the Leslie Spit, a purpose-made headland created from demolition rubbish. Out on the point of broken concrete and brick, you can feel like you're out in Lake Ontario. Standing out looking over the water is one of my only ways to see the horizon in Toronto.

Being near or out on the water is the best way to forget about the city but it's not always about leaving things behind as much as finding new things. Probably the most surprising part of Toronto is the amount of nature you can encounter thanks to the Ravines. You have to go pretty far to completely leave the built world behind. So many Saturdays I would ride 50-60 KM away from my house and still never leave the city, never leaving its sights, sounds or smells behind. One summer we went kayaking on the Humber River. You can ride your bike or just take the subway to a parking lot where a company rents kayaks and canoes. At the launch point you can paddle beneath the bridge that carries the east-west subway leaving you in the curious position of being on a lazy river looking up at a subterranean rail line. Once, while floating past the shoreline, I thought I spotted eggs nestled in the grass but on closer inspection they were really just faded golf balls. I guess I wanted them to be eggs, even if it made no sense. That paddle was full of surprising encounters. Gliding in and out of inlets thick with water lilies and tall marshy grasses, we met swans, ducks, spied fish below, spotted hawks floating above and saw egrets walking in the shallow water or perched in a willow. Those sleepy, slender white birds, lazing about on an equally slim branch seemed like an image from a Japanese wood block print. The image is still in my mind. Later in the year, we returned to the Humber to watch the salmon run and their attempts to jump the weirs in the river.

Read more »

Not Good in a (Fake) Crisis

City of Toronto Archives. Snow storm, King Street West at John Street. Photographer: Alexandra Studio 1961

Toronto has been absolutely sacked by two or three large snowfalls. 10cm of snow here or there never hurt anyone, but follow that with 20cm or more, followed by 15cm, another 20cm of snow and you will quickly bring a city like Toronto to its knees. Which, if I'm being honest, is fine with me. The first of these onslaughts had the noticeable effect of quietude. The heavy snow was like a weighted blanket that calmed the city and dampened the sound of traffic. Yet it wasn't a sweet silence but more of an eery one. Similarly, the snowpack filtered light through the skylights of the house and gave a sort of igloo effect as if the snow had actually piled up three stories high, blocking us inside. It was on days like this in my youth, that my father would essentially sound the alarm and command his sons to man a shovel and get digging. I always wondered what the rush was? When I would ask about the sense of urgency, his answer lacked what I would refer to as logic. "What if there's an emergency? We'll need to be able to get out of the driveway." he would say as if it made perfect sense. I still wondered what my father was imagining. If there was a medical emergency, how would being able to get to the end of the driveway suddenly clear many kilometres of highway to the nearest hospital? Those first few metres would be a dream of clear asphalt, but unfortunately, the following 10-15 kilometres would be passable only by snowmobile or dog team.

Read more »

Walk like a dog 

Walk like dog, if you wish.

We've all done it. We all have it. We all have a song that despite knowing the lyrics, we still hear them incorrectly, usually to humorous effect. The Bruce Springsteen song, Blinded by the Light, in its original version has the curious lyric, "cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night." The "deuce" refers to a nickname for original V8 engines or something. Even in that explanation, I wouldn't have understood it. Now listen to the Manfred Mann version, wherein an English vocalist evoking an American accent sings something that sounds more like "revved up like a douche" and you have added confusion. The fact that this version was played constantly on the radio of my youth only made my brothers and I even more confounded by it. The more you heard it, the more it confirmed your suspicion of it. More commonly, listeners to Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, often wondered if the singer was excusing themselves to either "Kiss this guy" or "Kiss the sky"? A friend of my brother's was sure the chorus the 1981 Kim Carnes' hit "Bette Davis Eyes", came through our fuzzy dashboard speakers as "She's got thirty days inside", instead of "She's got Bette Davis eyes." To be honest, the misheard lyrics sound as improbable as the actual ones. There are dozens and dozens of other examples.

In 1954, writer Sylvia Wright gave this phenomenon the name, “mondegreen”. As a child she claimed to have misheard a line of poetry as:
"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

The actual verse is, "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / And laid him on the green." Thus "Mondegreen" was, if not created there and then, at least given a name.
Read more »

It’s the hope that kills you 

The underdog Leafs won the Stanley Cup in 1967.

While reading Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, I took note of this passage on the slate used in London. “Much of the slate used in London building is striated by what geologists term 'pressure shadows' but they are inconspicuous beside the blackened surfaces of Portland stone.”

It’s often said that pressure makes diamonds but in Toronto I think pressure, like the striations in that Welsh slate makes shadows. Shadows, like a hex that darkens the eyes of men. Men who wear blue and white. Playing on a pro team in Toronto, where every eye of every media is glaring at you, must be a pressure that inevitably wears you down. Then again, being worn down on a pro athlete’s salary is not the same as everyone else’s “being worn down”. With the Leafs exit from the playoffs, two contrasting quotes came to mind. One from the team’s perspective and one from the fans’ point of view.

“A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.”
– Jack Dempsey

While this team found ways to push back and win in ways they couldn’t in previous seasons, they still need to learn how to get back up when they can’t.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

To be a Leafs fan is to see the team fall, bite your lip until it bleeds, urging them to get back up from the gutter we’re all lying in. Lying in that gutter, looking up at the stars, we hope to see our team soar among the constellations of champions. We hope for the best but expect the worst. All too often those expectations are met. We hope they’ll do better next season, but we all know it’s the hope that kills you.

70-year-old Salt Peanuts 

It was 70 years ago today.

In 1953 the US and Soviets announce they have the Hydrogen bomb marking the beginning of the Cold War. Eisenhower becomes president of the United States. Khruschev becomes head of the USSR. Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle and Eddie Fisher are the pop stars of the day. Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott are dueling heavyweights. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascend Mt. Everest. The first colour television set would go on sale and 70 years ago today, one of the greatest Jazz concerts of all time happened at Massey Hall in Toronto. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach and Charles Mingus played to a small crowd due to logistical mistakes and an underwhelming, amateur promotion. The show was undersold and mostly unknown until Mingus later released the recordings as Jazz at Massey Hall.

Billed by jazz critics as "the greatest jazz concert ever," the May 15th, 1953 concert almost never happened. The quintet of Jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Max Roach, Bud Powell and Charles Mingus had never rehearsed or even had a sound check when they made history that night. There are so many stories about this concert. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker arrived later than everyone else as Parker was late arriving at LaGuardia in New York, and Mingus' wife, who was an unexpected guest, bumped Gillespie from the flight to Toronto because Mingus insisted she accompany them. That night, Charlie Parker played on a plastic Grafton Alto sax as he had probably hawked his own to support his drug habit. Bud Powell on piano appeared stone cold drunk or in some kind a trance. Did it matter? No one played Bebop piano better. Max Roach fearlessly set the pace and always brought out the best in Parker. Who knew Charles Mingus would later dub over his own bass parts? Dizzy seemed more concerned about the outcome of the Marciano/Walcott title bout than the gig as he ran to a tavern across the street during intermission to check in on the fight.


The original album cover for Jazz at Massey Hall, designed by Canadian artist Arnaud Maggs, 1953. © Estate of Arnaud Maggs. Courtesy Susan Hobbs Gallery.

Despite the more popular notion that the early 50's represented a benign American polyannaism, it was more truly a period of creative blossoming and experimentation, especially in areas such as architecture, industrial & graphic design, illustration, painting, photography, poetry, film and music, especially Jazz.

Fish and chips of the Magi 

It's only been a few weeks but I think I finally have gotten the memory of a truly awful meal out of my mouth. Though to be safe I ought not think of it. It was a lovely snowy day, that turned into a cold damp night when we had thought to go out for a meal after a long-ish walk. The light wet snow was turning into rain. We were both getting hungry. Julia asked what I was looking for and only one thing came to mind: fish and chips from Allen's restaurant. Initially we thought to take the subway but the nearby station suddenly closed due to a medical emergency. Each bus that passed was packed full and offered no respite. While I was game to walk the 20 minutes or so to Allen's, Julia, whose ill-fitting winter boots were failing her, was growing tired. Thus here we were. I didn't want to ask Julia to keep walking in wet soggy boots and Julia wanted to fulfill my wish for fish and chips. The closest place was a sports pub that had been there for ages but with the notion that perhaps it was under new management we ventured forth.

Don't trust a restaurant that greets you with a potpourri of old cigarettes, stale beer, urinal puck and burned cooking oil. The cigarette smell was particularly odd as there hasn't been smoking in Ontario restaurants for over 20 years. In any case, let's just say the place with multiple screens showing a variety of sporting events (basketball, football and golf), was immediately without charms. I noticed a young lad, maybe nine or ten-years-old, ask his father if he could go to the bathroom and I was alarmed when the adult answered, "Yeah sure, you know where it is." So, this guy regularly took his son to this forsaken spot? Admittedly, this scene made me think, "Well, if you come back here, maybe it's better than I assume." Thus we sat down, Julia ordered a burger and I ordered the fish and chips.

What arrived was passably "food" and even though the burger was edible, the wet "from freezer to fryer" fish I had, was not. Normally I would give it that old college try, or out of an abundance of politeness, at least make it look like I tried, but it was entirely inedible and out of caution, I didn't go beyond the first explorations. The sides of tartar sauce and coleslaw were, I think, passed due, expired, gone off. What was I even looking at? I won't go into detail but needless to say, inflationary pressures aside, this was not what an $18 plate of food should look, smell or taste like. In fact, I'm still a little mad that we paid for it. Someone, in that kitchen, is going to kill someone one day. I'm not joking. There is no way in which that meal seemed safe to eat. Normally, I'm the guy who wants burgers made on the greasiest of grills. The more miles on that grill, the better. Give me fat and salt and I am happy, but this was really the straw that broke the camel's back.

Read more »

Skating Through Winter 

A little downtown skate.

For most of my life skating meant only one thing: hockey. As an adult I've moved on from late night shinny and pickup games that required an hour of driving for 45 minutes of ice time and a following day of barely being able to lift my feet, to more leisurely skates. Skating now is that more civil activity of circularly striding around a rink or trail until the cold has taken hold and your body has told you it's time to move on. Still, the glide, the breeze and especially the sounds are very nice. That scraping of blades on the ice reverberating and echoing around you is so evocative of childhood winters. The skating in circles, while repetitive, does remind me of those occasional school trips where a busload of us would be driven to the rink and told to skate dutifully around while perhaps the worst speaker system in the world blared some fuzzy Bay City Rollers. For those of us who played hockey it was a fun moment to skate circles around school bullies who inexplicably didn't play hockey (most likely due to some economic disadvantage). Even better for me, as I, for reasons still unknown, could skate backwards almost better than forwards, now had a chance to impress the most unimpressionable prettiest girls in our class. Oh yes reader, I played it cool. I would stride around letting my teammates whiz by, then with the simplest of spins, cruise easily around the bend, building speed with every crossover, then overtake Alison, Kim, Gina or Tina, and looking back at them say with an easy grin and head tilt, "hi, I think you're skating the wrong way." before hearing a resolute teacher yell, "Mister Rogers! Please, turn around!", "Yes, miss" I'd say and swoop past that one girl who'd falsely protest, "Hey, watch it, show-off!" then in a gentlemanly and quiet manner offer, "oh I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you." At which point I would pick up enough speed to lap my clumsier classmates and glide along side her and say, "You again, didn't I just see you here?" I think I could elicit a giggle. Here, on the ice I was as confident and pithy as any Jane Austin paramour. Off the ice, I had nothing and would return to doodling in the back of my Hilroy notebook. Innocent times. I still take pleasure in some, though not as much, love of the ice. I see it in others too. We're not the brash ones. We're the ones holding back and making space for kiddos that might fall, who then decide to lie there looking up at the clouds. Trust me, we want to break free but we'll put our hands behind our backs and slip into an easy floating pace.

Read more »

A Certain Loss of Grace 

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Early spring in Toronto is a wretched sight. The snow has melted and muddied the soggy parks. The puddled pathways are dirty with mashed litter pressed into every crevice. The city's trees, still dormant, are barren, brown and lifeless. Any green on the grass is but a stain. The hems of buildings are splattered dark with damp and mildew. Every grey building is smudged into the grey sky. Toronto looks like a place that was once affluent, but is now down on its luck, exhaling "a certain loss of grace" as Italo Calvino* might say. It's as though the wet of the season has washed all the colours away. The wealthy have left behind their mansions, long since converted to boarding houses, so sub-divided and mean, that their inner smallness bursts down slanted stairs, past improvised doors and out cracked windows. The coldness of the air is the only thing suppressing the earthy rot from blooming. Gusts of wind whip around corners carrying a confetti of garbage and a skitter of empty plastic bottles.

Read more »

The Rhythm is Going to Get You 

What's that lil' bird? I can almost hear you.

We'd had a few days of high heat which meant my windows were closed and the a/c was on, then the temperatures broke and it was quickly cooler outside than inside. This meant I could open the windows and that's when an odd thing happened. It got quiet. The roar of traffic sounded low and distant. I could hear a streetcar's air brakes breathing. The fan of a nearby building's a/c whirred. Birds were chirping and twittering busily. A slight shush of gentle rainfall was a background to it all. Then the blare of a car horn, the rise of a straining truck engine moaned, the whine of a car's brakes that needed changing and the clatter of someone moving a garbage bin all combined to end the relative quiet. Moments later the cacophony of the street quelled again. Then it returned. I soon realized the waves of sound alternating with peace was simply the traffic lights changing at Dundas (aka "The Street With No Name") and Parliament.

The pandemic meant for a brief time that the city did seem quieter but in my neighbourhood where Parliament Street is an important access to the Gardiner Expressway and the Lakeshore and with Dundas (aka "The Street With No Name") as a major route into the downtown core, traffic sounds returned to pretty much normal far earlier than other parts of the city. I've always known this is a busy and noisy area. Around midnight on Monday nights, there is commercial garbage pick-up that happens twice: once eastbound on Dundas and a second time southbound on Parliament. Both times, the noise is incredibly annoying and can last 10-15 minutes each time. I have gotten used to it in the sense that I turn the volume of my TV or music up to block it. The funny thing is that when there is a break in the general noise, it is always because for whatever reason, the traffic has subsided.

Several years ago, the TTC replaced the streetcar tracks at Dundas (aka "The Street With No Name") and Parliament. The noise was relentless and due to its high priority went as late as 11:30 PM. An unexpected bonus however was when the construction shut down on Friday of the long weekend, the intersection was impassable thus blissfully quiet for three days. It's easy to see that most (and I do mean most, as in 90% or more) of the pollution I'm exposed to (air, noise, light) is a direct result of automobile traffic. The heavy particulate seen on my window sills? From cars and street traffic. The noise is obviously from cars, garbage trucks, delivery vehicles and motorbikes fitted with penis enlarging exhausts (dear motorcyclists, adding a noise maker to your crotch rocket really just broadcasts your feelings of inferiority and in no way enhances anything). Lastly, street lights and traffic lights mostly exist for cars. If these lights were really for pedestrians, they'd be much dimmer and lower.

All of this occurred to me recently when I was passed by an electric vehicle that rolled by making no more sound than its tires rolling over the asphalt. I wondered what would it be like if every vehicle on the street were that quiet and clean. I could breath easier and open my windows more often. I'd hear birds more often. I'd hear gentle rain more often. Electrification wouldn't eliminate all the air and noise pollution but it would eliminate a lot of it. Thinking of this makes me wish that the "electrification" of our world would be a huge benefit by not only diminishing carbon and petrochemicals pollution but also noise pollution. I'm sort of hoping that electric cars will also discourage people from cranking their car stereos because it uses too much juice but let's just tackle one problem at a time, then maybe we'll still have a society to electrify.

Simulacrum of Nature

We ate breakfast al fresco. Then we took to our bikes and rode over warm asphalt, under a bright sun, up a long rising hill. We navigated side streets and a dark, dank, urine soaked tunnel to emerge into a neighbourhood of wealth and leisure. We found a hidden trail and slipped beneath a canopy of trees down into the cool pocket of river valley air. Amongst some touristic ruins we abandoned two wheels to amble in chlorophyll green light. As the sun rose higher, we felt its heat press down upon us. We had striven to save ourselves from the sun’s power. We used creams to block the sun from our skin. We donned sunlight blocking glasses to protect our eyes and hats to shield our heads. Yet as the day wore on, the day wore us down. We sought nature and now we felt nature’s rebuke.

We retreated from our forest bath wearied and hot, sweaty and tired. Apparently we need nature more than it needs us. Our withdrawal from the out of doors meant that we found comfort from within doors. In a bright, sunny room, air conditioning breathed coastal breezes while we streamed a playlist of song birds. Our simulacrum of nature complete, we could finally lay our heads and dream our dreams.

Read more »

Join Us and Be Alone Together 

As the rest of Ontario joins Toronto in the post Boxing Day lockdown, I would just like to assure them that everything is going to be alright. In fact, life may not really be that different at all. We're all used to being unemployed, stuck at home, going nowhere by now, right? A little while ago I went into the office to retrieve some equipment and the lockdown was a lot more evident in an emtpy office building. Here's a clip of what it was like.

Some Starry Night 

Sometimes the Universe doesn't care for your plans.

As Toronto finally joins the rest of Ontario in “Stage Three”, which sounds more like a cancer diagnosis than a pandemic economic recovery plan, we’re trying to return to normal except we really aren’t. We’ve had almost 40,000 cases of COVID-19 with almost 2800 deaths, so there’s really nothing normal here, new normal or otherwise. Whether it’s all the restaurants that can’t fully re-open or the closure of movie theatres or the fact that travelling somewhere, anywhere, now feels unnecessarily risky, the pandemic has sucked a good deal of fun from the summer. More than the pandemic however is my own skin which won’t quite heal from the urticaria that has plagued me for the last eighteen months. Fun in the sun is a no-go. Stepping out in the searing bright sunshine almost immediately leads to painful hives. I’d love to go for a paddle but sitting in kayak sweating would be my undoing. A cool swim might be the perfect summer treat until I have to shower and soap up which may turn my skin into a living version of kimchi.

Instead, I’m trying to focus on the stuff I can enjoy this summer instead of all the stuff I’ll miss due to either the Pandemic or Urticaria. I might not get the long rides, kayaking or swims but there will be hammock hangs, grilled meats, home made ice cream, and movies on a shiny, new TV beneath the chill of the A/C.

Read more »

Didi & Gogo Take a Ride 

You meet all kinds on Toronto's streetcars.

On a street car one Saturday, sitting behind me were a couple of real quality chaps. Their use of language was not sublime but limited, basic and coarse. I could smell their cheap, damp cigarette residue a mile away. 

One of them was clearly a native Torontonian as he called to his travelling companion:

“Phil! Phil! Phil…”

“Yeh, what?”

“That was my old school right there.”

“There’s nothing there.”

Phil was obviously the more observant of the two. He had pointed out several times that “there’s nobody there. What’s that bitch talkin’ bout? There ain’t nobody there.”

“I know, sh**head, it was my school. Gone now.”

“Probably gonna be a new condo or some other f**king bulls**.”

“Yeah.”

I learned two things about this man and his travelling companion. He grew up in Toronto, and now even in his late-50s he hasn’t ventured far. He, at some point got an education (a fact belied by his grammar). He is most likely Catholic. Though the school at some point was referred to as Regent Park/Duke of York was only recently purchased by the Catholic School Board for redevelopment as a new school, he used its “Saint something-or-other” as its designation, a practice I only know to have been done by Catholic schools. Protestant schools were far more likely to name a school after an alcoholic or racist white guy. In any event, it is currently an empty site. I remember when the school was demolished and how the dust was constantly in the air while the machines did their work. More telling was the smell of mould, like musty, mildewy books most likely left to be churned up and crushed along with the brick and cement. 

But back to Didi and Gogo (I’m not sure why I called them that? They were like the two hobos of Waiting for Godot but I’ve long forgotten Beckett’s character names). Why was I being such a petty jerk in my assessment of them? Classic classism I guess. In all honesty I thought to myself, “Why am I so annoyed by these two troglodytes and why do I think they are troglodytes? What is a troglodyte?” Well, firstly, they didn’t sit together but instead, separately took up two seats each (I believe the term is “Man-spreading”), and sat with an additional row between them all while carrying on a conversation by basically yelling to each other. I mean if you want to talk then sit closer together. Everything about them, especially the way they spoke, full of cursing (particularly cursing about other people they spoke of) and just their overall – what? Aura? Body language? Whatever it was, it is exactly the same tiny clues that they would pick up from me to assume I was some hipster douchebag (designery eye-glasses, jaunty scarf, tapered jeans, thoughtfully unshaven, scowling while scrolling through my iPhone or countless other unsaid characteristics I’m unaware of). 

This topic fascinates me. How quickly we pile up tiny indicators to put people in box. I do it so often I’m genuinely surprised when someone I’ve quantified turns out to be very different. I remind myself not to “judge a book by its cover” even if a lot of books are easily and correctly judged by the design of the jacket photo or illustration. Still there are a lot of books in this world with easily judged covers and even more people who by the tilt of their head, their manner of dress and speech are probably exactly the kind of person you think they are. 

This still doesn’t explain why I was so annoyed by their unlimited and entirely meaningless conversation. Its volume? Loud and annoying. Its content? Dull and pointless. Their rudeness, loudness and assumed appropriation of the space was driving me nuts. Why should I care? Why should everyone else apply societal norms but these two can flout them? It was almost as though their complete lack of agency in every other part of their lives entitled them to exert themselves as much as possible in this public realm. And here I thought I was the entitled one? In truth, I am pretty lucky. Born in the right place at the right time - the proverbial third base so I guess I can let these guys have their moment of empowerment, after all, while I can steal a base at a leisurely stroll, they might never make it home.

End Times Margarita 

Stay at home, inside, spinning your wheels. Illustration by Paul Blow

Well, it’s been forty days since I last gathered with friends for a public event. One where we sat together, drank, listened and spoke to each other within a two meter radius and hugged each other good-bye. Forty days in the wilderness. Forty days confined in solitary. Forty. Four-tee. For tea. Language in an empty house sounds strange. It’s strange how long ago forty days feel. Not like a month or so, but almost entirely out of memory. Days pass like weeks. It’s the strangest aspect of this time. Time itself. I usually know the day of the week but have no idea of the day of the month. It’s messing with my perception of time. It’s a forced perspective of time, like a crazy kitchen but with minutes and hours.
Read more »

Is It Safe? 

Image from the Todd Haynes’ film, Safe, which pretty much looks like someone practicing safe social distancing.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?... Is it safe?

Babe: You're talking to me?

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Is what safe?

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.

This is a scene from the 1976 thriller, Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier and Roy Scheider but it could just as well be a scene between the public and the public health authorities during a COVID-19 press conference. In truth, we only know what we know. What we know is the only way to beat a virus is to avoid other people who may or may not have or even know they have the virus. The only way to do that is to stay home and avoid other people. To me and those of my ilk, this is not really a problem. As explained often, I’m almost neither here nor there about seeing other people, even ones I really like. I have been accused of being incapable of making an “emotional connection”. I’m not sure about that but I do know that I do not have the capacity to love any one person enough to share a tandem bicycle, or even a two-person kayak. Basically, I’m like a low maintenance house plant, I’m here when you need me, but it’s alright to forget to water me for a week. To some, being separated from others is like sucking all the joy and sunshine out of the world.
Read more »

Return to the Mean 

Regression towards the mean - via Jeremy Tunnel

On the recommendation of my dentist I started using a new type of toothpaste; the kind for sensitive teeth even though I didn’t find my teeth that sensitive. Since then I’ve worried that I’m deadening the sensitivity of my teeth to the point where I'm not noticing any small cavities that may become big ones because I’ve turned off the sensitivity that is an early warning system.

Now I wonder if city living is making me less sensitive to all the stuff a big city throws at you. Am I hardening myself to life simply by being exposed to so much of it? By living in such an overwhelming environment am I in fact using a sensitive teeth formula on my soul (if there is such a thing)?

Let me back up a bit. A friend was visiting and brought with him his beloved folding bike (a customized Bike Friday) to ride about the town. He had ridden this bike in faraway places such as China and nearby places like New York City. Yet, in less than 24 hours of riding in Toronto, his bike had been stolen. As gutted as he was, I was equally distraught and depressed for days afterwards. How did I let this happen? Why did I let him use his spindly cable lock – a lock similar to the one I was using which was snipped when my own much loved shiny bike was stolen. I should’ve suggested we walk somewhere after he admitted that despite his years of riding experience he could only describe the traffic in Toronto as “mean”. It is mean. To date of my writing this, there have been 23 deaths of pedestrians on Toronto streets this year, 16 of which were over 60 years old, so no, these were not witless teens walking into traffic looking at their mobile phones. Streets are too wide and traffic is too fast… and too mean.
Read more »

I Lost More Than I Gained 

“I could tell you the temperature and wind speed by feel. I knew the humidity index by my sweat. I knew the date by the moon.”

I use to have a bad habit of coming home from work, lying down and having a solid nap. I’d wake up, weigh myself, then feel guilty and go for a run. By the time I got home and showered I’d be eating supper sometimes as late as 10 PM. Then I’d go to bed and sleep like a baby. Sleeping well was the first thing I lost when I stopped exercising but it wasn’t the only thing. It’s been ages since I’ve run regularly and in the meantime I gained weight and got doughy. Like 20 lbs doughy. I’ve since realized I've lost more than I gained.

When you run all the time you get to know your neighbourhood. I knew every pothole, every stage of every construction project. I recognized other runners who were regulars. I knew if I was ahead or behind schedule by who was sitting on their porch. I knew when the SPCA volunteers would walk the dogs in their care. I even knew those dogs. I knew cats that prowled and scurried from shrubs or beneath cars. I knew what flowers bloomed when. What trees budded and for how long. Because I often ran at dusk, I had a sense of how the moon was waxing or waning. I knew the mix of smells, mostly sour and urban, but some sweet and floral. I knew which neighbourhoods smoked more pot than others from the pungent acrid smoke that followed the men on their evening walk. I knew the sounds of kids and the names that would be yelled across the park. I knew which birds to avoid in the Common - trust me, do not turn your back on a redwing blackbird. I knew when the raspberries beneath a public art piece were ripe or that there were berries there at all. I knew which water fountains worked and where new ones were installed (the new ones have a spout for pets near the ground and a taller faucet for refilling water bottles). I knew when ball games were played or when local teams practised. I knew which sidewalks had heaved in the spring and which had crumbled in the fall. I knew which street lamps were faulty and which alleyways were lit. I knew when streetlights would change and could count the seconds accurately in my head (“1 Jeremy Irons, 2 Jeremy Irons, 3 Jeremy Irons, go). I knew when garbage trucks took which street’s waste. I knew which houses had well kept gardens and which apartments ordered a lot of fast food. I knew where the cabbies gathered to break and talk their native language.

I could tell you the temperature and wind speed by feel. I knew the humidity index by my sweat. I knew the date by the moon. I could tell you the next day’s weather by the clouds. I could sense who won the big game by the traffic on the Gardiner. I knew people’s private moments when they thought no one was near. I startled more than a few couples canoodling (poodle faking as a friend’s father would say).

I knew my pace by counting in my head. I knew how far I’d gone by my steps. I knew how to add 500m more, 1 km more, 2.5 km more by lampposts and stop signs. I knew my heart rate from touch. I knew my body fat from a pinch. I knew my weight to the gram by my lightness. I knew every street name, stop sign, no parking zone and house number. I knew where raccoons gathered, where rats were plentiful, where rabbits hid, where foxes, deer or raptors might be seen. I knew the time of night by the stillness. I knew the darkness because I ran within it. I knew where crackheads smoked, vomited and pissed. I knew where the prostitutes stood, bored and anxious. I knew where the cops slept. I knew when the seasons changed by taste. I knew when the skateboarders would land their jump or stumble from their boards. I knew when grass was cut, where drugs were sold, where dogs crapped and where drunks passed out. I knew the city better than the back of my hand because, honestly, the back of my hand isn’t that interesting.

But that’s all lost to me now.

Auf Wiedersehen Fimbulwinter und Der Struwwelpeter 

Classic Shockheaded Pete. Image via Washington University Library

Last weekend, many a media concern heralded the arrival of the cherry blossoms, a sure sign that not only had spring arrived but that the shackles of a monstrous winter, Fimbulwinter in Old Norse, had been broken. I like to think of winter’s chains as a chastity belt repressing the natural world from doing its thang. Yet it was not to be. Despite a warm sunny Sunday the buds of cherry trees were still shuttered closed, pregnant with blossomy colour indeed but still closed in their husk. The excitement around the cherry blossoms has reached such a fever in recent years perhaps due to social media that the City worried that the crush of visitors would need to be curtailed. In a brief shining moment of the rarest form of bureaucratic wisdom the city took the measures of banning cars from High Park for the duration of the flowering trees (with 2000 cherry trees donated from Japan it has the highest concentration in Toronto) and publishing an online map of other significant locations of cherry trees in the city.

I, thinking myself a very clever boy, took it upon myself to visit what looked like the most unlikely spot to view nature of any kind. Apparently there is a stand of cheery cherry trees to be found at the junction of Cherry Street and Villiers Street, which is one of the few truly industrial areas left in the City of Toronto. There are film “studios” here (also known as faceless warehouses) along with a nearby large concrete facility that maintains silos of slurry to fill the thousands of concrete trucks feeding Toronto’s construction frenzy. There is a small mountain of surplus road salt covered with tarps weighed down by old truck tires which is kept by the Ministry of Transportation and Destruction of Water Tables. There is a canal where large tankers can turn around when delivering salt, sand and sugar, three of the four main ingredients of modernity (fat being the fourth of course). This is a place movie productions film dystopian futures, because it is a place of dirt, broken roads, garbage and the shadows provided by the falling Eastern Gardiner Expressway. The air is full of heavy metal particulate, dust, sewage, the sounds of wild dogs barking, the droning din of highway traffic, overhead helicopters and ascending and descending aircraft. It is not a place easily brightened by a few colour tree buds. It is even less brightened by naked branches of trees looking for all the world like they were dead.


Toronto's most uninspiring view.

The buds of these trees were still in hiding, and who could blame them, but my own blooming spring look had already taken place. For months I’ve adorned a beard best described as a bundle of twigs dusted with icing sugar (because I’m so sweet). With aplomb I trimmed, pruned and decimated the winter beard. So long Struwwelpeter. Sayonara Shock-headed Pete! It felt freeing and terrific to cast off my castaway look. Yet, I missed it. Or my face missed it. Suddenly my chin looked pale, small and doughy. How was my face so small? I hardly recognized myself without my cloak of hair. Bald faced and shivering, how could I go out into the world?

I immediately started growing it back like the darling buds of May. The beard is dead, long live the beard! Vivat barba!