September 15th, 2020 - I rediscover Toronto after grocery shopping

This all be fiction:

 After a long, long personally arduous journey, I've returned to Toronto, the city that I'm from. I'm back living in Kensington with Mario and our subletter Nikki and its the same place but a very different tone. COVID has changed many things. The city seems wilder, there is more tension, and I'd say its a little less friendly. That's to be expected, there is so much uncertainty.

I'm no longer an extremely broke Ph.D. student hitting his mid-thirties. I'm a young-ish (contract) scientist for the provincial government doing research roughly related to bugs, forests, and climate change. No, its directly related to those things. I also get the luxury of working remotely, which has made all the beautiful difference in the world. I don't know how long it will last but maybe that is what is making it so pleasurable. I love the word pleasure, it sounds and looks just like it means.

I walked home from Fresh Co. and like most budget, clean, bright grocery stores, it put me in a cheerful, perky mood. Maybe its that I can afford stuff more now and yet choose to be frugal and eat relatively clean and cook. I don't know, its maybe just the abundance of food and goodness there that does it. I denied buying a homeless guy beer, though I myself bought 3 today. His knuckles were injured, raw and infected. I didn't like the pressure he was putting on me. I resented it and maybe that makes me petty. I bought pizzas, bread, salad, and a few other supplies and started walking home.

In the restaurant, I think I saw a Chinese girl I'd recognized from way back. I'm not sure from where, but she had distinct poofy big hair and looked just a tad boss eyed. She was attractive though. Even in budget grocery stores, people are attractive here. Like I realized while up north, Toronto, downtown, is just a sexy place. Its young and vibrant and things happen here. I should try to stick around for a bit, with semi-frequent trips to the north.

On Nassau I saw the little restaurants and bars and the lights looked so warm and glowing this evening. Its getting cooler and it feel so good to be back with the people and noise and music and vibrancy. Though I was in a terrible state last year, I now can thrive on this human energy. This vibrancy. And I don't feel old anymore, I feel just right. The haircut helped.

And now somehow, I see Toronto as a new city with fresh eyes and as a tourist and it is so beautiful. It is as inspiring as anywhere I've been and even if its for a night, I'm grateful to be moved this way. It had all the makings of an Anthony Bourdain show and I felt very suddenly, the reawakening of romance within me. Romance for life, for travel, for colour, and cities, and everything looked glowing for just one moment. I want to drink at those bars and eat at those restaurants. I should go out at least once a week.

For the moment, I'm happy how things turned out.

I want to go back to Japan. Its one of the few things that still has pull on me. I'm not quite sure why but it does. Don't let it dominate your life again, but do a good job for research. This has been your bridge home many times. This has been your ticket to the world and has just been upgraded.

Thursdays Fridays Saturdays and Sundays

I was meticulous. I walked two hours in this small town to buy 1) weed, 2) a bottle of sake because there was no shochu 3) a pack of Belmont deluxe, 4) instant yakisoba. I missed Japan. As much I liked curry, I missed the tastes of my old life. I missed Japanese girls, Japanese women, cold beer in wooden izakayas, the language, the feeling. So on some nights when I lost discipline, I took Benadryl, cut off and ignored new conversation, and made my sweet and salty yakisoba wihle downing a beer, following it with cold sake, and eating a box of rural Canada yakisoba while I watched Japanese shows on Netflix. My Japanese is bad but I still want to do these things. Isn't that funny? Is it lame?

Almost, almost every bad decision you make, every sin that you cave into, comes to haunt you in the morning. The good choices too. They are quieter and more an absence of pain than the presence of pain. That is your reward for having foresight at 2:55 AM on a Thursday night.

My father's 65th birthday

I wonder, has the short form of Instagram and its very public nature affect how people think? This is rhetorical. I think that the short form of Instagram and all these other things have affected how people think. I think its made them more diffuse and hive-minded. I also think if you're used to it, its no worse than how we used to operate.

My ex-girlfriend, who I wrote extensively on blogs, passed away at 33. I wrote so much about her. I don't know how it happened and I found out about it on facebook and for a day or a few days, I was tangibly affected. Now though, I don't know. I think its swimming underneath the surface. I remember the tiger in Koreatown and holding her there and that gritty pizza place. I remember funland arcade and playing bust-a-move for naughty favors. I bought her a rose. We drank tequila and the bill was about a hundred bucks and how we made out afterward drunk on the street and we were caught by Kay, this girl i knew through a friend.

Its now mythology to me, marinated so deeply in emotion that its not honest to be factual about it. It  all seems so romantic and young and dreamy and innocent. I was absolutely nuts about her. I cried when I knew I had fallen in love with her. Times with her brothers, that time on new year's even when I listened to baby blue on the way to her apartment, the feeling of life opening up. I will never look down on the worlds of young people. I was 19 at the time. That was 15 years ago. I'm losing hair but I look similar. But it was another time, one that is precious and deep within me. So awkward but passionate. What else? The food she made. Curry udon and korokke. The colours of her house, the poutine we got by her place, I think the owners were Filipino. Empty time. CVS2 and Third Strike. I wish she didn't die. I'm not quite sure how to feel about all of it. All I can do is pray. I felt more at home there than I did in my own home. Her brothers were like my brothers. Let go by m flo. Mini discs. newness and an open open future. Ichigo ichie wabisabi mononoaware. Miso soup for my dad. Pictures on my clunky flip phone that I cherished. Cavalclade of lights. This is how I feel about you. Long nights playing games, long happy nights. Lotion and blankets. The end. That is also precious now. Us in the stars. L'arc and 90s Japan, forever love, beach boys and love generation. The door to her house. Pictures I took and disposable film cameras. Waiting at booster juice. Physics at the same time. The loneliness aftward. More about me, less about her now, but I want to foc us on her. The collection of bags and her kanji poster. Penguins and chili willi. March of the Penguins. Being with me forever. Dragonquest and slimes. Trying to get closer and closer. My tasteless kimchi fried rice. Farting. She was funny. Connie. Mou hitori de aruikenai, toki no kaze ga tsuyosugite.

We shared our love and longing to be Japanese and be there where we should be and together we were a bit closer. Being with you made me more Japanese and Japan became you. But you are you and that is more important always. I want to write more about her because the blurry memories in my mind get blurrier with time. And they are of so little consequence to others but to me they are precious. To her, at least at the time, were precious too. She had her own life in the 19 years before I met her and the 13 years afterward and most of that is forever unknown to me. Darren's room when she texted me. Andy. The arcade. Oranges at night. All night and turtle. Filling out the painful voids within myself. Happiness.

I don't know. It took so long to fill that hole within myself. Maybe I took the breakup so hard because of my childhood. I don't know, it probably mattered. Later, maybe many years later, I will talk to her little brother, the youngest one. And I'd like to buy him a good beer or shochu and food, and talk to him. When the pain lessens and we can both talk. The pain must be unbearable. The profundity of it is as deep as the ocean.

I did love her and I knew I would always love her. Once you love someone, it sort of stays around inside of you.

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I'm reading Gurdjieff. Its good and I think its at least better than playing Starcraft 2. So is blogging. This is also better than playing Starcraft 2. Despite Instagram and the chaos of the world and social media connections, we all still die and as of now, the facts of life seem the same as they have always been for the most part. At least the core seems rather unchanged. And maybe this is why it feels good to read old books like they were new friends.

I'm going to finish my wine. Probably no chips for tonight. Smoke a j then hope to pass out.

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 Where are you chipea? Where are those champion socks that I saw a decade ago? The comments were a small part of my life but deep enough and comforting and had warmth and hope and newness and freshsness. I hope you are well too.

"The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not." 

- Phillip K. Dick

Another blog, will put some effort to make this last.

So yes, a new blog. What's new? I'm 34, a dude who somewhat works as a scientist, and am currently floating around in a small forest town due to quarantine. Sometimes I get lonely and go on omegle to chat and am bewildered by the fleeting, uncaring nature of anonymous digital conversation. I have good friends and a great partner but I am another one of the modern, millenial, alienated people. I always wonder, how do others find relief? What do they hope for? Do they find their lives meaningful? Maybe its time for me to have kids.

No, no time for that. So I've said this before, but I miss the old style of blogs. Xanga, etc. I miss the personal, consistent element of them and how we all used to develop semi-meaningful to meaningful relationships and friendships. It really served a purpose. I don't identify strongly with my current social media self, which I try to keep minimal. I don't find they give me much relief and adds more to anxiety and stress. Long form, sincerity, expressing, and reading the inner thoughts of yourself and others is what I thought was cool about the blogging platform. I wonder, has this change in technology changed our inner worlds? Do people still have long, tender, emotional thoughts? Yes, of course they do. I wonder though, what has changed and where will it end up? Am I just a fossil? No, I don't plan to be. My friends and I talked a lot on Discord about hermetic stuff and Mario said "the inner world must be built. You need to put effort into it." I agree now. I'd like to create art, like Phillip K Dick said, so I can make my own worlds come to life.

I will still carve out this tiny corner of the internet. Here are some pictures of my nostalgic teenage TV viewing:





Let me talk about all three for a second while I still have the patience and discipline to write in paragraph form. These three shows/channels have a few things in common. All of them were local (Torontonian or at least Canadian) and had this very certain 90s, downtown Toronto urban aesthetic that was a little gritty, a little wacky, maybe not as aggressive as other places, but I don't know, very fucking cool too. The anti-gravity room was focused on comics, games, and sci fi fantasy nerdy stuff, and had a very DIY aesthetic. I think I'm so persistently nostalgic about these things is because 1) they introduced me to the larger world from my little living room in Brampton and 2) because they were deeply comforting and still are a sense of reality and sense and normality in a world I sometimes find strange, shiny, and surreal. COVID climate change identity politics. I find these things difficult even when I can handle them.

Anyhow, SHOWCASE introduced me to weird movies, which I used to watch for their sex scenes. This is how art and culture and weird shit was introduced into my life. I will always remember a Ewen McGregor with chinese characters on his body, shivering naked then committing suicide. Sex in these movies was not pornographic, but real, sometimes jarring, sometimes tender and had a very different effect on me than I anticipated. Dwarves and elephants and women. Sadness and pain. Quietness. Prostitution and drugs. Tenderness. It was not just that, it was the camera work and story and music, it all goes in you. And for once, I am glad I was exposed to that stuff, lured by sex, and subliminally taught art. There is great value in art and people promoting art. I truly believe its a sign of vitality and health and progress in a society.

And lastly, the Wedge, hosted by Sook Yin Lee, showed me indie music like Pavement, Weezer, thrush hermit, husking bee (not really), and a bunch of other bands. The lyrics, sounds and sincerity gave me a lot of comfort and maturity and I don't know brain and heart food for a time when I didn't feel like I had much around. Just youth, hope, and wonder, and time. Time, time, time.

I hope this doesn't become a nostalia blog but here's one more for the road.