Tuesday, September 19th
When Faced With a Stranger
The 24 is a bus that goes along Sherbrooke Street in Montreal. I board one westbound at St. Denis, and take a seat in an otherwise empty quad, next to an open window for the afternoon breeze. I slide my shopping bag between my legs and consider the empty seat across from me.
A man my age takes the seat to my right. He too has a shopping bag, which he carries on his lap. Soon a woman takes the seat across from him, and then across from me sits some other woman. As this one settles into her seat, I feel as she kicks my bag, in a soft and gentle sort of way, trying to create what room she needs.
She is young and attractive in a plain sort of way, wearing a simple white sweater with buttons fastened almost to the collar. She opens a book with its cover to her lap, though across the top of the pages I can read a stamp marked ‘McGill’. She is the picture of eager academia, so it’s not surprising that when I look to her face, I find her head down towards the page.
The outside provides relief from having to consider this woman further, except that I notice as she keeps looking up from her page to look out the window, to glance in what I take to be my direction. Eventually she starts rubbing the sides of her nose and then chews on her fingers.
As she shifts in her awkwardness, I see that she is reading Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please”. This happens to be one of my favourite writer’s these days, and so I think to tell her so, and say something remarkably ordinary, something like “I really liked that book”. Except that I either don’t say it loud enough or it’s just too far out of context to say something to someone you don’t know, so that my comment fails to register. Nevertheless, I’m determined to make the connection, and I reach my left arm out towards her and say it again.
This time she looks up, and meets my comment with a smile. “What story are you on?” I continue, and she says “60 Acres.”
“Is that the one about the Indians?” I ask, and she tells me that she’s only gotten to the part with the trespassing boys, so she can’t be sure. Then she wants to know which story was my favourite. I say it’s the one where the woman orders a birthday cake and then doesn’t pick it up from the baker for a few days because her kid gets sick, but that I think it’s a story from another collection. Then she says that she’s reading this one because it’s a collection that was published after Carver’s editor made significant changes without the writer’s consent. I say that I didn’t know that, and then she says yeah, it’s true, and with a sense of certain seriousness, gives me a list of reasons why this is interesting to her.
We continue like this for a while longer, till she gets off some place west of Atwater. With my attention returned to the empty seat across from me, I'm left to wonder why the designers of this bus ever thought to put seats facing each other as close together as they did.
Posted by Eric on 09.19.06 @ 11:04 PM EST [link] [No Comments]
Wednesday, September 6th
Feeling Good About Pissing
I was recently in New York, staying with cousins who live in Tribeca, a downtown Manhattan neighbourhood. Their curtain-less living room window, some seventeen storeys above the street, looks out on the Federal Building, which among other offices, houses the FBI. Each morning that I woke on their AeroBed, it seemed possible that agents across the way were watching me from their desks.
Five days in the city, even when not much happens, is packed full of incidents and experiences. And in light of some recent emails about pissing in parks, it makes me think to share one particular moment from my time in Manhattan.
I had been out for a while already, having met my friend Jeremy for a hike along an abandoned elevated railway known as the High Line, a curiously quiet stretch of the city that runs twenty-some blocks through Chelsea. We were wet from the rain and tired from the walk when we finally said goodbye on 4th Street. Continuing south on West Broadway, I set my sights on my cousin’s, looking forward to a comfortable toilet and a nice hot shower.
I caught stride with a group of three walking the same direction as me. One of the men in their group was particularly loud, animating himself for the sake of his female companion. I couldn’t help but listen as this man explained why school in Philadelphia was the shizzy-dizzy, whatever that was, and why this woman absolutely had to come visit.
I looked ahead to see a man, downtrodden to say the least in a weathered sweatshirt and tired face, cross our path. His stench was unmistakable. In a city of insiders, where ten thousand interesting things may be happening at any one time but they’re all somewhere off in private and you either have to know where to go or have the money to get by the doorman, this was a man of the streets. I imagined him as the constant wanderer, in a never-ending state of motion.
As the Philadelphian continued with his rant, his woman let out an ‘aww’, that compelled us all to turn to see what she had seen. And there, at the base of a mid-block street sign, it became clear that this New York City street person had moments before defecated right there on the spot. What we saw was a man stumbling away in relief. The Philadelphian responded by saying, “well sometimes that’s has you got to do it”, but for my part, I felt nauseous, maybe because of a simple visceral reaction, and maybe because I was determined to carry my load all the way home.
In any event, I wanted to move past the incident as quickly as possible, and so I stopped inside the first store I saw, a second-hand retailer called ‘What Goes Around, Comes Around’. There, I found well-worn Motley Crue t-shirts on sale for two hundred and sixty dollars and a beautiful but bored clerk setting a line of cowboy boots in perfect display. Order seemingly restored, I had to resist the urge to go right there on their perfect hardwood floor.
Posted by Eric on 09.06.06 @ 02:25 PM EST [link] [No Comments]
Tuesday, September 5th
When the Finish Is Known, How Do You Psychogeography?
This week we meet outside Dundas West Station. Michael's the last to arrive. He has with him some two-dozen plastic plates, forks and knives, which he carries in a sagging plastic bag. He says it's for tomorrow night's Winthrow Potluck, that the only way is to carry them with.
So we set out, five walkers and two dozen plates, forks and knives. We walk south of Bloor, where we notice some curious store displays; a mens' wear store with a variety of brown fedoras, marked with $3.79 cardboard tags tucked in the hat band, a barbershop supply store for all your barbershop needs, signage that seems from another time. As we continue along, it seems that the whole block has transformed. Store after store, the frontages are throwbacks, which we later learn is part of the film set for a Hairspray production that will shoot over the weekend.
We continue on Roncesvalle, speculating on friendly neighbourhood watering holes and Polish delicatessens and why the east side sidewalk is stepped, though mostly we pass by without much hesitation. The drycleaner with half its store space given over to plants and the travel agency with a madman's mask window, his head topped by a fluorescent green mohawk, are exceptions that require further contemplation.
Knowing I won't likely attend the Potluck and wanting to participate in some small way, I offer to carry the plates a while. Michael accepts, and carrying the bag, maybe fifteen pounds in plates, it's amazing to me that the plastic hasn't yet torn. Oh, and we head east on Harvard, find a delightful court of houses on Callender, and learn how to send group texts from Todd. At some point Michael takes his bag back, mostly because I chastise him for not carrying it himself.
We continue south on Jameson, cross over the streaming lines of lights that is the Gadriner Expressway, and arrive at the lakeshore. It happens to be ten-thirty, in time for CNE fireworks, and in the distance to the east, we watch as periodic bursts of colour fail to inspire anything more than comments like, 'oh' and 'i think the windmill's kind of cool'.
For a while we sit by the Martin Goodman Trail, a recently opened stretch of asphalt that runs next to the water, and watch as a small party of revelers drift by aboard a small motor boat. They're singing along to some cheesy eighties song, which could've been Kool and the Gang's 'Celebration', even though it wasn't.
We wander on into the Ex, through crowds on their way home and on past the Food Building. We imagine what it might be like if all buildings listed what was inside them in one-word descriptions on the facade, like School, Clothes, Automatons. Perhaps more inspired now that we're on the grounds, we stop to eat deep-fried donuts, to do backflips off the harnessed trampouline (That's right. There was one boy, maybe seven years-old, who looked like he was floating, getting higher than any of the other jumpers. He also seemed to be having the most fun, laughing his head off, and it made sense at the time that the way to jump higher was to let it all go and float, real zen like. After that, I just had to try it).
Having sated our appetite for the Carnivalesque, we exit through the GO station, across the train tracks and into Liberty Village. It's at this point, in the terrible motorcade that is the King Street tunnel, that we discover we've left the bag of plates somewhere behind. Michael steps up, backtracking for the goods that I have most certainly helped to forget, while the rest of us push on for Sudbury Street, for an opening at Mercer, and yes, for a Thursday Night walk that ends at The Drake.
Posted by Eric on 09.05.06 @ 04:09 PM EST [link] [No Comments]
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