Back Baby

I’ve been riding my bike almost  everywhere now. It’s really remarkable and you can get almost anywhere in the city. People comment on my glasses, standing in line for food, waiters, homeless people, everyone thinks I look like Harry Potter, which is cool, I guess. There were times where I might be flattered, or ask people why they like my glasses, and that I got something right I would feel good, but these days I mostly just nod or barely emit something audible. I really don’t care. It’s kinda tough for people when you don’t give the slightest shit. They think you’re putting them on, maybe, or that you’ll snap out of it, like it’s a phase or something like that. They have no idea. To me, it’s really funny, I love how people can get really involved in stuff that has perhaps no significant bearing on their actual lives. Like who’s invited to the royal wedding, if there are snacks in the break room, or whether or not eyeglasses are fashionable.

I don’t really get it, I guess. I mean I do sort of get it, people’s lives are void so they fill it with meaningless shit to make it seem like it’s not. So that they feel like they’re apart of something, and that their opinion matters, which it does, but no one gives a shit about fashion from yesterday.

I feel like I’m digressing (from what? I do not know), it’s all a lot of playing. It’s a game that changes as you play– which is not my quote. I think that to be really smart, to be good enough, not to need to fill yourself with needless noise and stuff, that you have to need your work. Like you really need that shit, and if you don’t get it people are going to get hurt. No joke. Work is like the only justification for being here, everything else pales in comparison. I mean, think about it, what else can you do everyday for 8 hours at a time?– also not my quote. It’s hard though, you have to be careful to ensure you don’t get burned out. Like Matthew Mcoughnehy said in that movie “You’ll break your differential and tip the fuck over, or even worse implode.” I mean not like that with all the senseless hedonism, but the work-immersion factor is a reality. We ultimately become what we do.

That’s why strangers commenting on your appearance is so funny. They have absolutely no idea where your heads at, and they try to approach you, make a connection and it’s like trying to wake someone up who’s dead to the world. You’re trying to connect with me by commenting on me while I’m totally distracted by something you have no concept of. Fuck me. It’s really hard, you know being active minded. A lot of people, and people conceptually are reactive minded, I think. I mean human beings are reactive by nature, what with inventions and so on, but to be active minded I think takes a lot of skill and experience in like equal quantities. You have to know the patterns of the game you’re playing, as well as how to get your play across. I mean, this doesn’t really go without saying, but you know what I’m getting at.

I think the best things said are things that you wish when on a little longer. Silent treatment, and trying to get people to talk aside, we all know someone we wish we could be talking to right now. Maybe they’re dead, or maybe they live in China and you can’t speak Mandarin, but you know the important thing is not really wanting people to talk any more than you can listen. That would be wasteful.

Return

I am a writer living in Toronto. I am 26 years old and I live in North York. I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment, with three houseplants. I guess I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was about seven or eight years old. I found this old notepad amongst some things that my parents had that wasn’t really being used and I started writing in it. The story was about dinosaurs, and I never really finished it, and I wonder if I finished it now if it would be the same ending that I would have came to when I started out writing it. From there I wrote a lot of things that I never finished. Throughout adolescence and my young adult life I became influenced by a lot of different places that morphed my writing technique and style and I think that, for the most part, these influences were really just poses and shtick and were never really indicative of my true style.

I’ve met a lot of great people living in the city who are really cool. There are people who you can tell they mean what they are talking about, and that’s really exciting, you want to write about that. Other times you can meet people who you know are hiding or holding something back; they don’t really know how they feel about stuff, I don’t have anything against people like that and I kind of feel sorry for them because they obviously have something they’re after even if they don’t know it. I think that the best type of people are those like us, who let people realize what they’re doing wrong on their own and don’t force anything that doesn’t come naturally.

I love women. In this city I think that I’m really inspired by women, and would like to write about them. I could write about them at length and I think that I wouldn’t ever get bored or feel discouraged. The women I’ve been with have all been great gals, even the relationships that aren’t sexual are really great. There’s just something overtly entertaining about them that I find incredibly engaging, if I had to build a team of race car drivers I think I would make them all women and I would work on the pit crew changing their tires and banging on their roofs to get the hell out of here!

A lot of politicians talk about the problems this city has with transportation. I think that comes up a lot, transportation, and how to make it more effective and efficient for the people that live here. I think it’s pretty great, honestly, there’s nothing wrong with it that isn’t wrong with climbing into a metal cylinder buried underground that travels at high speeds. I like riding in cabs though, it’s like making a new friend. Like you get to choose where you’re going, but you don’t get to choose who you meet along the way. I think that it’s funny that we can talk to the people who drive in cabs, but on the subway we intentionally try to avoid eye-contact with each other. I think that the subway could be a great party with a lot of sex and music and people really enjoying themselves before they go to work. But then I guess there would probably be more people missing their stops.

They’re increasing the minimum wage in Toronto, and I guess that it’s a good thing. I don’t know, I make more than minimum wage and I don’t think that if I earned much more than I do that it would really make me feel any different. I’d probably feel worse, like I wasn’t really earning it and that I should probably give it away to people who aren’t having a good time. I don’t really see much of an objective in money, people are really crazy about it and I think it’s because that they feel that if they don’t get it their lives will suddenly be a lot worse and they’ll be pushed out on an ice float or something like that. That’s a big deal, wondering about what might happen to you if you don’t do stuff. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever really known what I’ve been doing so I don’t really imagine how it’s going to end up, if I do it always comes across as feeling phoney and unsatisfying.

I’d like to buy a really nice fast car. Just to be able to drive it and see what I could do with it. I’m sure in the first month I’d have a bunch of tickets and that the cops would know me, and I’d have my license revoked. Still I think it would be worth it, I’d like to join an underground racing outfit like those guys in The Fast and the Furious and get intertwined in street loyalty and thrill-seeking, that’d be rad. I just think that there’s something inherently tied to who we are in vehicles, you can tell a lot about people by how they get around and what kind of car they drive and how they drive it, I think that you should have to show your license and registration whenever you meet someone for the first time to determine if they’re a suitable match or not. Like, hmmm Volkswagen beetle? Yeah I’m not sure if that will pair well with my Chevrolet Suburban, or maybe it would I don’t know.

It’s kind of interesting what’s happened to smokers in the past 20 years or so. It’s almost like a taboo now to be a smoker, like a secret shame, and a dirty little secret. My mom smoked for a lot of years despite the warnings and negative publicity, eventually she decided it’d be better to be able to live longer than enjoy a smoke. I think that there’s way worse things than having a cigarette, but it’s like so many things in our society that once we start doing something we feel like we absolutely have to do it. We become like little extremists and bad habits become the insignias of our lives, the only things that define us that not everyone else does. I think people would be a lot better off if they thought less about what they do and just focused on doing more that feels right to them. Maybe the family is to blame for creating a system where we feel like we’re forcing ourselves through series of events that go against who we are. I just think that adulthood is like taking the best of what you got when you were developing, and trying to break out of a trend of belittling yourself because you feel like you’re still a kid.

I don’t have internet, and I barely have data. It’s funny because I say that and I feel like people immediately think that I’m someone who doesn’t need the internet. I totally do access it, and I feel like I do need it, but I think that having it in my home, my domicile, where I rest at is like too much. You already work in front a computer that’s connected to the internet, and virtually everywhere has some level of Wi-Fi or what have you. I also feel like we as a society, though, literally can’t function without some kind of screen in front of us. It’s like, if you take that interface away, suddenly we don’t know where to go, and we don’t know where to look to find the stuff we need, it’s a little alarming because what if something were to happen to that infrastructure, no one would know how to do anything. So I guess a lot of what disconnecting means to me is forcing myself to re-learn how to do basic human things that have been overlooked because they’re so basic. But it’s like, you still need to know how to cook, and you should probably know how to parallel park.

I think speed is a really great value that we can find everywhere in Toronto, people are obsessed with it. Everyone is looking to see who does things first, and where the quickest way of do anything is. I guess that’s human nature actually, like water choosing the path of least resistance. But then if there’s too much of a concentration of water, then it will evaporate and transform, gather and form a rain cloud and then rain down in the form of water again. I guess it’s like the circle of life, but water is inanimate even though we need it to live, it has no life in itself.

I think dogs are like humans who never developed the ability to bullshit themselves. They don’t ever brush their teeth, and they are (despite the best efforts of their owners) almost exclusively nudist. I think there’s a lot in that. Humans feel the need to cover-up a lot, I feel like a dog has shame, but it’s a human’s business to live in denial. I think dogs are great reminders for us, sort of like how we relate to other mammals without feeling like we’re lowering ourselves. Humans are really funny that way, they require a sense of privacy to do that which comes naturally to them, and that’s like a distraction for them from the similarities they share with the Daschund shitting on the Bermuda grass.

I love to ride trains. I think it’s one of the greatest ways to get around. You can really feel yourself settle in when you ride a train, time and distance are harmoniously passing by and it’s like you found a comfortable mode in which to let yourself go. I don’t think much really of staying in one place for too long. Maybe it’s the evolutionary traits of a hunter that I share, or maybe it’s just some childhood insecurity.

Vocational Opportunity

We appreciate all that apply but only successful candidates will be approached.

“businessmen… peripheral, half-educated creatures who’s academic failures had forced them to earn a living in the dull, second-rate world of commerce.” – John Cleese

The fact of the matter is you’ve got to have some dough. My father was quick to remind me  any time I made some complaint or registered some crippling insight about my current job. I would rarely respond back because he was right. There is simply no getting around the necessity of cash. Consequently I spent much of my late teens and my early twenties working jobs where I was abused, manipulated and treated like the replaceable cog I was. Discouraged, depressed, and disillusioned I sought anyway to tend to my egotistical wounds and remedy my feverish desire for dollars.

Graduating with a degree in English Literature teaches you two things: one, that you have forgotten more than most people will learn, and two that the western world is indifferent to argumentative abstractions and historical examinations. This is fine. Everyone knows that a liberal arts degree is the sandy foundation upon which any number of great things can be built. Nevertheless one should not satisfy themselves with being an artist merely after purchasing a large and expensive canvas.

*

“Don’t let em getcha.” A billboard whizzes by me as I sit westbound to union station, 7:43 train, all stops to Union with connections in Aldershot. Dress? Suit: Ted Baker, Tie: Calvin Klein, Shoes: destroying my heels, Overcoat: cheap German import. The guy next to me, grey, paunchy, staring into an IPhone, look around they’re all staring at devices. I look out the QEW whizzes by, the harbour front, the distillery district, LCBO head office. A voice on the loud speaker;

“Ladies and gentleman welcome to Union Station and have greeeat Monday!” The bodies lurch up, queue up, begin the drudge to the office, the box, the paper, the people you don’t really like or know. The desk that’s oddly personal and strangely imprisoning. The knowledge that this is your life, the rest of your life.

The street: freeing, main artery, Bay Street, Queen Street, Richmond Street, Adelaide, University, John? No not John, Front. We meet on Front street John from Crayon Risk Solutions, he’s paunchy too, we get coffee.

“No not Second Cup.” He says derisively, instead we go to A&W. A&W coffee is better than Second Cup. His eyes flash around lazily, he is too big of a man to work behind a desk all day, I wonder if he will drop dead in front of me. His eyes are sunken deeply into his head and the jowls of his face are grotesque. How much fat until you reach bone? Still he’s a quick well-adjusted man of forty, he touts proudly he is above 140 people, impressive. Impressive to a kid whose father has worked alone for twenty years. He prances about in conversation:

“How’s your family?”

“Where are your friends?”

“What did you study?”

And then his eyebrows lift, measuring the surmountable risk of having coffee with an unemployed, twenty-three year old.

“What can I do to help?”

But then we both know the answer to this, there is only one reason I am here and it is the same reason he is here every day getting fatter and convincing himself that 140 people justifies being grossly overweight. It echoes in the wind and flies from the newly immigrated a&w worker and the guy in the Armani suit at the table across from us. The ever beating abstraction.

He looks at my resume;

“This would have been a good experience.” he says absently.

“And oh it was!” I confirm grinning with enthusiasm about a job I had just condemned the previous day. It is simply amazing how one’s attitude changes when there is something on the line. He continues to look at the resume and then looks at me, sadly. Suddenly I am shaking, already sweating, I am now deeply afraid. Something in his eyes is beyond terrifying, it is something I have never seen before: complete and utter acceptance of total, unending misery.

“I’ll pass this on the HR.” he says honestly. But the message has been conveyed: Get out! Run! Run as fast as you can from places you do not belong and never return, attractive prisons are prisons just the same and here the shackles are of want and greed. We are the corporate damned, strung up in paisley ties.

Outside I am back on the street, in the cool October air. I am no longer sweating from the breaches of hell, saved once more from an unjust fate. I look across the street at a homeless man: Spare A Little Change. I smile and walking toward the train station breathe a sigh of relief the future has been bartered off for one more day. Still I haven’t the faintest clue what the hell John does!

Pound The Pavement

I’ve always wanted to run faster. When I was a kid, maybe seven or eight I would shoot out the back door after school and bolt down the street to my friend’s house. Then we would run, jump and climb over anything in sight. Darwinism embodied by young boys. There is something primitively liberating about the act of running. Like its counterpart; combat, it is naturally bound to human nature, intertwined with impulse it acts as unforgettable tool to get us in and out of situations.  Whenever I go running I feel free, less constrained by the boundaries of everyday life and suddenly what seem like insurmountable problems in my life become significantly more manageable.

Medical doctors believe that there is a direct relationship between the act of running and endorphins released in the brain. The endorphins once triggered enter the runner into a euphoric sense, in short they make you feel like a god. Aside from being a great form of exercise running is also mentally constructive, allowing for a necessary release in the individual it alleviates stress and boosts confidence. Though people think that a runner is confident already, this is actually not true. A runner is only as confident as his run that day and if it happened to be a less good one it will reflect in their mood. Consequently like any habit or hobby running is one that challenges the individual to increase personal bests, to surpass goals and to achieve excellence. Why some of the greatest runners in the world can be seen crying at the end of a hard run is indicative of the emotional and physical commitment they put forth. They become invested body and soul and their physical temperament and dedication becomes reflective in their mental state.

This does not explain why running encourages such a massive following. It seems like everyone these days is supporting a run for this or training to run for that. There are running hats, running belts, running watches, shorts, shirts, sweatbands, reading material, periodicals, sports drinks and little packages filled with some odd salty tasting goo. The capitalist body has long since tapped into the running market and the result is a bloat of products and gimmicks. Though I am hypocritical, I do maintain a favourite brand of running shoe “Asics Gel Cumulus 13” and I prefer running with a synthetic variant of shirt as opposed to cotton (it doesn’t chafe my nipples). These products are not however, why I run. I have yet to view a commercial that has pushed me out the door to start pounding the pavement. A product can help out your running game but it will never do the work for you.

I had the opportunity to participate in a ten kilometer race while I was in  Germany. The value of participating in a race allows you to experience how your running style compares with other runners. It is also an excellent exercise in pacing as you will quickly find out your strengths and weaknesses.

When the race started I took off like a flash, feeling confident and maybe a bit cocky I quickly over exerted myself within the first five kilometers. The rest of the race was a test of endurance and I was mildly embarrassed when the people I had so easily past within the first kilometer came to pass me in the end. An ego will only get you winded in a long distance race. Still there remains the interesting fact of being able to see the variety of different people running. Folks from all walks of life get out to do these ten Ks and the result is a large mixing pot of old and young, scrawny and dense all participating in the timeless human action of running.

My personal favourite is the gentlemen of about sixty or over. They are spry and consistent, their run seems to only slow down or speed up when the race is over. They are chirpy without being insulting and are confident without overestimating their abilities. My assumption would be that after so many years of running they have hit a plateau, they will no longer get any faster but their tough-old-man mantra will not let them slow down in the slightest.

Look out your door this evening and you will see what I mean. The whole world is running. No longer running from sabertooth tigers and volcano lava we are running from old age, obesity, or just the folds in our stomach. Running feeds a human impulse that cannot be satiated by the creations of modern society. Elliptical machines and bicycles are baser foes to the monolithic run. The earliest creation of exercise and the first cases of physical exertion brought about by the run are the result of humanity’s first encounter with coordination. Since the inception of society  we have been continuously pushing limits and setting records. The ancient Greeks, realizing capacity for human accomplishment regarded running in the highest by naming the god Hermes the god of speed and granting him winged shoes for his abilities. Running is here to stay, and since out living its practical and first uses has come to be regarded as useful in itself, an art of form comprising of discipline and mental and physical determination.

The Ride out West

The Ride out West

            For as long as I can remember my father has exclaimed about the sensation that to him is western Canada.

 “People just go out west to live son,” he would say, and then as if to form a rebuttal with some imaginary opponent, “People in Ontario are just different.” As far as I could tell British Columbia was just a really large rock pushed too close to the water. People decided that they would colonize between the rock and the water and then somehow they started thinking they were better than everyone else. The reality is that British Columbia is just like anywhere else, and as a general rule humans collectively agree that mountains and oceans are beautiful and so you have an entire province proclaiming itself “Beautiful” which really just encouraged their sense of inherent superiority. The reality is I can barely see the mountains trapped inside the back of this Chrysler station wagon. The most I could tell you about them is that they have offered one insurmountable obstacle that required the wrongful employment of the Chinese and several hundred tons of dynamite to build shitty little winding roads all through the mountains. Beautiful British Columbia, indeed. My dad starts singing “there’s a feeling I get when I look to the west” and all I can think about is what my friends are doing in Scarborough and how I’m trapped against my own will in the back seat with my little brother who keeps leaning on me. The only feeling I get is motion sickness when Dad takes a corner too sharp. Then we stop. And we get out.  And the air is different, its thicker like the trees have spread their roots through it and I look out on the landscape of trees and mountain and rock and wilderness and I actually feel. “They’re redwoods you guys…” My dad whispers so faintly because he only has to whisper because its dead silent. There are people there too in caravans and Winnebagos, “just living” and they greet us silently because they don’t want to break the silence. Everyone is speechless because everyone knows that whatever can be said is an insignificant proportion of the beauty in nature. Then eventually we get back in the car, we drive away and return to Tofino, or Comox or Vancouver, the cities are humanity’s insignificant proportion to the beauty of the west coast. We drive and we drive, through “shitty” mountain roads and onto fairies and off fairies and it occurs to me just how vast it is. I think I might want to live here one day, if I can. I think about the future, about getting a Winnebago for myself and of sitting on the side of the road for hours, for days. I think about what it would mean “just to live”. My mind grows content with the thought of reflecting on an impenetrable landscape of Canadian beauty. I smile to myself maybe for the first time on the trip because I still hate those damn Vancouver Canucks.

            

The City of Toronto

Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge, they’re the chosen whites. – Rage Against the Machine

It’s summer time and I am in the backyard with my older brother. We are sitting on Muskoka chairs that my father painted the year before. They are peeling already. My brother Jeff sits in the red chair and I in the blue. I pick the paint chips off with my finger nails.

“Don’t do that Jake, I’ll catch shit,” my brother scolds. He is only thirteen but he speaks like he’s forty- a result of his experiences. I sit quietly in the summertime air and I look deeply into the red of my brother’s chair. It’s a bright fire-truck red and it blazes in the July sun. My brother cursed when he sat down I guess it had been cooking there for hours.

“How do I know what red is?” I ask Jeff.

“What?” he pants, overheated and annoyed.

“I mean, what looks like red to me, might be brown to somebody else. All through school somebody would learn that brown is red and because it says red on the label they would spend their whole life believing a colour looked a certain shade and they would be wrong.”

“You can’t read minds,” my brother says and covers his eyes with his baseball cap.

*

In 1997 we lived on Westmount Avenue our house sat just north of St. Clair Avenue West; what was unofficially “Little Italy”. Every time Italy won a soccer match the neighbourhood erupted in honking as the fans raced their trucks, sedans, and grandmother’s station wagons down our street at top speed. My dad said it was reckless so I guess it was.

I had friends in the neighbourhood, lots of friends. I would go out and play with anyone who had a ball, a net, or on the odd occasion a secret to tell. It never occurred to me that the kids I hung out with were different from me. I mean I knew I was white and they were Turkish, Jamaican, Italian, Portuguese, or Oriental. But it never got in the way of playing with toys or games, or inventing new ways to utilize the awesome powers of superman. If it did I think it would have violated the sanctity of being children. I was white, but I wouldn’t learn what that meant until years later, until history class and rap music would inform my white friends and me of the reality of our historically dominating and blood-thirsty race. William Blake wrote in his poems that the recognition of innocence is innocence lost forever.  He was a white Christian.

On one occasion after I had been romping around the neighbourhood I came home with more than bumps and bruises. I remember returning to the backyard of our old house where my Dad was stationed with a beer.

“Dad?” I ask.

“Yes Jake,” he responds, listening.

“We speak normal right?”

“We speak English son.” He says without condescension.

“Oh. It’s just that I was talking to Saleem and he said he spoke Turkish with his parents, I said I spoke normal with my parents.”

*

The decision to leave your home country and come to Toronto is a big one. But, now that you have decided to come to here, it is important to learn what you need to do and bring before you leave home. – City of Toronto Immigration Portal

Welcome to the Jungle.- Guns and Roses

“No Immi’s!” Brandon laughed. It is 2005 and we live in Guildwood. It’s a suburb with indistinguishable houses and two cars in every drive-way. We are red-eyed mealy-mouthed teenagers cackling and hissing the afternoon away: our parents’ pride and joy, tad-poles, neophytes. I am in the Backyard of my parents’ new house –twice the size of the old house- with seven or eight of my friends.

“Sean, Jason, Ian and I were all at shinny last night.” Brandon says. “And one of the guys had a jersey on that said ‘No Immi’s’”. They all laugh hysterically at this and I laugh with them, not because it is funny but because I am fifteen, and because I am afraid of losing their respect. It is a laugh of fear.

Sean’s phone begins rapping “Go! Go! Go! Shawty it’s your Birthday!”

ride and joy hissing the afternoon away our parents’“Shh, it’s the Russian” he whispers and begins trolling on the phone.  Our mutual friend, an immigrant from Russia, would spend his entire high school career trying to identify himself alongside the rest of the white students from various Anglo-Saxon ancestries. He would become excluded not because of where he was from but because of his obvious attempts to be something he was not. The backyard turned into a boardroom as we all waited for Sean to pull the wool over The Russian’s eyes. As he hung up the phone we all burst out laughing again. We were a pack of ravenous hyenas in the backyard of my parents’ house.

It was a private escape where we were free to accept the realities of our identity. Whether sought or unsought we invariably took it upon ourselves to inhabit the cruel and loathsome single-mindedness that had been foreign or unbeknownst to us in childhood. Being proud of who you are, acknowledging the reality of your culture, was obstructed by the patterned behaviour we inherited. As young white males we were destined to repeat a history of the violation, deception and exploitation of other people. In some cases decimating entire civilizations for competing against us, in others manipulating those wished to emulate our behaviour. How could we acknowledge that and be proud? How could we acknowledge that and be anything but the racist bigots, the horrendous generals, and the ubiquitous and condescending conquerors that had conceived us?

After my friends left that day I walked up to my bathroom. I took a shower, and looked in the mirror. I was ashamed of things that I had no control over. I was more disgusted with the fact that I used it to justify my boorish behaviour. Looking in the mirror I saw myself and felt truly afraid.