gilded toronto

on the 12th of november, lambros & i walked in the early morning cold to laurier station where we took a train to the gare centrale in montreal for our bus to toronto.

it was a megabus, a fairly cheap canadian & north new york state bus company that promises $1 fares but really costs $30 or so. the bus stops once on a roadside somewhere in ontario where you can buy tim hortons or serve-yourself coffee and tea from a lady who says, when you are struggling to count change late at night, "it's all right, dear, i'm here all night. take your time." on the way there, i bought black coffee and smoked in the cold sharp morning sun, and lambros had a bagel with cream cheese. in retrospect, he says it was "ashen." not a montreal bagel.


this is a blurry photograph i took of blur-bros.


and this is a blurry photograph of me outside a historic school that i wanted to go into but it was closed and i think only open to school groups anyway. sidenote: in montreal at parties or at any time really people leave bottles of white wine and beer in the snow on balconies to keep cold. sidenote: people also put frozen blackberries in their room-temperature cider to cool it down.


lanterns in a window in chinatown. the street signs in toronto are very careful to tell you which district you are in at any given moment. one block little portugal, one block little italy. you should never be confused about whether the bakeries will offer pierogies or croissants.




it was still autumn/fall in toronto so we played in leaves.


streetcar tracks, nostalgia for melbourne trams.


two different kinds of coffee-drinkers, linked by the fluorescent vest of a construction worker.


i like toronto's lack of prettiness. black, ironically-titled bars next to fading sausage companies. flat, wide streets that only widen in the fog. our luck there: on the first night, accidentally entering the royal ontario museum through an unmarked and unguarded back entrance, skipping the exorbitant fee and flickering quickly from jewelled korean combs to dinosaurs to nests to carved narwhal tusks, hoping no-one would catch us and demand to see our tickets. natural history exhibits, jars of coral and bones, typewritten labels in capital letters. dead birds arranged like pairs of socks in like colours.


and then at night slipping into ronnie's local to drink whiskey in the front window and listen to the bartenders and a girl with tinsel blue hair.


waaaaaaaaaalking.


a lot of buildings in toronto are made of those dark brown smooth bricks i associate with 1996 and also 1972 and discovering the coldness of bricks in the library at my high school at the end of each aisle, curling up on lonely summer lunchtimes. still in november hallowe'en decorations hung on front gates in the streets you turn down that turn out like quiet suburban white-posted streets only they are metres away from crowded commercial streets. skinless gaping pumpkins and very white cobweb tendrils on knee-high fences. angle-roofed houses next to tattoo parlors and dollar stores and accounting firms with newspaper clippings in the window, ketchup on the table before you sit down in a heavy red plastic costume.


we slept on the third floor of a very, very cheap hostel that always smelt like spring rolls but a private room is always something good to come by. even if you do not sleep through the toronto night and are woken up by whispers and then again after dawn. we drank ethiopian honeywine and devoured injera. i want to scoop up lentils and red cabbage with soft sour bread and know why eating food with my fingers beats silverware any time.


staring at maps in the art gallery of ontario. we also visited an antique market that had a rolliflex camera for $500 (as usual), furs everywhere from thickened cream bear to red to brown rubbed the wrong way and looking through a box of old postcards and bits of cardboard encased in plastic, the stall's proprietor talking angrily, self-consciously, about an alarm clock at auction that went for too high a price because of the man who owned it, a minor celebrity.

and after not-very-long in toronto we returned on the bus to our little house in montreal with boxed sandwiches and i read foucault on the bus, a 2000-page norton anthology of theory and criticism balanced on my knee. november undoes its stitches in a hard one-way lane among types of dinginess not seen elsewhere. puritan fabric, "brave as a clown with crossed eyes, i walk from" are the words that end my toronto notes.