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This time last year I was...
Nov. 9th, 2010 03:31 pmAw hell, it's November. Time to update the blog.
As it is November, we're well into the days of dwindling sunlight and all that it entails for all our mood levels. Personally it's put me into a rather introspective and slightly confused mood, though the cold plus the cold medication for the past two weeks probably didn't help, and I've been waffling about decisions more than usual.
So today I waffled myself into not going to class and instead I am organizing some finances from the last few roadtrips I went on. While I was going through my records in Google Apps, I came across a curious document which appears to be an experiment in liveblogging I performed from my Android ADP1 dev phone written around this time last year and I have decided to transcribe the strange series of words here (sans the mentioned media) in its entirety and edited only for formatting, for benefit to the record of surreal events in the history of humanity.
Note that the following was written at a time where I had no friends in the city, was not going outside except for absolute necessities, had lived alone for 3 years and had recently decided that Hunter S. Thompson was the greatest author to ever live. Naturally, the reader may notice a few strange characteristics in the writing. I am all better now...
On Saturday, November 28, 2009, Fumon «xxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com» wrote:
It was 8:11 AM when I reached the door of my apartment. By the time I had finished typing that and locking the door it was 8:12. I had woken up 5 hours earlier at 3 something after having completed a stint of nearly 24 hours of service in the land of Morpheus – the one who rules dreams as opposed to the one who wears dark sunglasses and says “Neo” a lot... though he was probably in there somewhere – and had, in the time it took for the sun to come up, decided that today was going to be a wretched day.
An hour after that I had decided that it would be an alright day as long as I could find a McDonald's(c) burger within the next 10 minutes. It was then that I remembered that normal people like to eat a meal called “breakfast” at this time and that, short of interacting with someone using a weapon of some sort, this was not to be. So, after further brain consultation, I decided to go out. The where wasn't important and neither was the path taken to get to it.
At this point in the narrative, I had reached Burger King and had attempted to order a burger – a triple wopper I had decided - only to discover that even here in the feeding trough of the anti-McNaming scheme do they follow this outdated standard. I turned down a coffee and decided to type those sentences to vent my newfound contempt for this place and to seriously aggravate the staff by loitering near the front typing without buying anything, that would show them for quashing my morning burger dreams. Here is a picture I decided to take immediately after this semicolon; look at those concerned staff.
Afraid that some crack squad of ninja Burger King employees were moments from killing me, I fled the court of the king of haphazard interior color schemes and headed east along College street. By the time I finished typing that, this is what I saw; the man looked back briefly before no doubt deciding that his rights to personal privacy being violated blatantly for an unknown reason – admittedly for all parties save the reader at that point – wasn't worth the ensuing legal battle. A one legged black man I intended to take a picture of asked me for directions but politely declined the aforementioned photography. This after I gone through the trouble of booting up google maps could only be attributed to his staunch liberalism intervening unlike the man earlier.
I decided to turn down McCaul st. at this point but a man apparently saw this as a form of social masonic code of some kind and asked me how I was and added what he probably thought was a witty and original Canadian “buddy” to it. I searched my mind for the appropriate response code and selected to mumble something resembling a “mmaritem” which produced the desired effect of the man's departure from my presence. As I finished describing that complex interplay for the benefit of the youth readers, I had reached College and University and wasted no time in noting this earning me a complete lack of strange looks.
I took this as a sign to turn my course south into the bowls of this city's financial district to see if I couldn't find some of the rare and mysterious white excrement which you can never adequately explain when you see it in snatching glimpses between the folds of the one-ply toilet paper you bought on sale at walmart as the mass spins down into what today's people assume to be oblivion; little do those same people realize that, at least this far into the cement & concrete jungle/nuthouse, it is filtered and evaluated by machines and workers for reclaimants and flows into some place which is connected with the ocean or the supply to the people of that same city and in an ever expanding and exponential fashion touches everyone on the planet as it gets drunk by billions in minute quantities and put into recycled toilet paper and rubbed over more peoples assholes. Think about that next time you pinch off a loaf or indeed say or do anything as the same rules apply to everyone and everything to some degree either through boring physics and entropy or through the endlessly entertaining games of broken telephone and “he says she says” that this fine species of ape has honed to it's primary skill since it's dawn: your shit touches the entire planet.
~~~~ Fumon Note: I have no idea what the hell I am talking about here but after lengthy analysis (2 minutes) I have decided it has something to do with an intense dislike of gossip at the time.
Either that or temporary psychosis. ~~~~~
It was at this point, 9:21 after meridian to be only partly irrelevant in precision, that I had been sitting on a bench on the divider between the two lanes of University Ave. near a memorial to the fallen something or others to which I put a hand to heart before moving to said bench. I could feel the mighty rumble of the subway underneath through my parked buttocks every few minutes or so as it whizzed through its subterranean tunnels like a herd of running investment bankers banished to the inky depths to become molemen – or molepeople as they supposedly would insist on being called – and feed on and covet the dropped items of passengers; victims of the economic times people would respond when the topic came up in conversation around the watercoolers to be replied to with muttered agreement and sympathy. It's funny that the utterance of this incantation can evoke such unanimous a response from so many separate parties in both Canuckville and Jesusland similar to other recent additions to the lexicon of excuses like hurting the environment or supporting the troops. I say excuse but perhaps it is the wrong term, the issue I have with sayings like this doesn't concern their factual credibility, their truth is only occasionally questionable and then only in hind sight or liberal blogs. No I take issue with their use as blanket terms that serve to cover and gloss over the whole story that just got told and brand it to be filed away and defined as just another of “those” stories, another line in the tally of whatever cause it associates with. It's the lost stories I cry about at night, the grains of history lost in the desert. This is the way we comfort and shield ourselves from the cruel deep realities of life, with labels and catch phrases we can reduce things to the level where we can keep going with the everyday and fit it into our worldview without stopping to think of the implications of what we just heard, more noise than thought, understanding nowhere to be seen. More people's shit touching everyone in the world and just like the shit in your coffee you go right on
drinking without a single thought.
Speaking of coffee, I had by this point wandered into a Tim Horton's which for the benefit of those of you from Jesusland I should explain is like a Starbucks but without the heaping of smug and you can still order a large coffee completely absent of a barrista – e equivalent volume of human blood – another difference from Starbucks - I was rewarded with a paper cup full of wakejuice which I removed to the safety of an unbussed table near the window. The seat was still warm from the previous occupant's time spent there consuming what appeared to be a carton of chocolate milk and the matching half of a tunafish sandwich which remained. I moved the tray to another nearby table while thinking of the grim fate which awaited the morsel in the establishment's garbage can before being whisked to the dump of eventual decomposition; another noble sacrifice by this species which evolved from the pedigree of sliced bread to form a whole spectrum of breeds from the common ham to the fashionable BLT to the surprisingly delicious and rare ruban – the true breed of which has become endangered in recent times and has endured only through the unpure line of western condiment instead of the russian dressing to which it owed its beauty – to the radical european sub or hogey, all of which based on a design which can be consumed with a only a single appendage – including a foot as it turns out – and which fits in every human hand and developed without a committee or standards organization to enforce the specs or even a patent – though it most likely has been by now by someone with a remarkably small penis and a combover though I am too horrified by the idea of patents to find out, google is your friend – truly a wonder. Today the idea would be bought as a takeover of a start up and then rebranded the “iWich” by marketing where it would then be released with ads occupying the outside of the bread with the inside containing an end user licence agreement which would begin with “By biting into this sandwich you agree to the terms...”, different fillings would be optional accessories and all models would come with the essential ability to play MP3s. Clearly, this is progress. A reminder that all original ideas contained here are property of my brain and interested executives, you know who you are, should contact my people of which I have none.
At this point an asian couple who had sat down at the table and were reading some sort of paper with words on it – a history teacher had called it a newpaper or something though actually seeing one, the paper looked quite old and grey to me, doubtless the discount option likely with only a paltry 1GB of MP3 storage – next to me asked me to take a picture of them. Having done so and sat back down I was surprised when after a minute the man asked me to take another picture of the pair. Having satisfied him for the moment, I took the chance to escape before he could corner me with more photographic requests by leaving, my coffee having long since been finished. It was 11:32 and the streets showed further signs of life and having been brainwashed by the asian man I took more pictures of the street, shown here. This was a mistake. I had been writing this text in an email addressed to myself on my cellphone and as a further example of the dangers of associating with the Chinese it had turned communist and decided for me that it would remove the last hour of progress and no amount of swearing or threats would phase the electronic socialist. So, deciding quickly to cut my losses I tried the tactic of asking said device where the nearest internet cafe was and after some time considering this it thankfully replied in the enigmatic way in which these devices are prone to and I began to walk towards the intersection of Younge and Dundas.
Enroute I encountered the kind of sight which takes a few moments to travel from the optic nerve to the brain and from there proceed to sneakily burn its way into your memory before you have any idea what you've just seen, I was nearly a half block away before I realized that I had passed what could only technically be called a woman wearing a plain green skirt, leather boots, black hose, a top of a type and fit to her which I could never dream to adequately describe here but featured leather as its primary component, hair the color of regurgitated bile and styled to match along with a face which I first took for a block of wood carved by someone with severe hand tremors and who kept starting over; all of which gave her an appearance almost but not quite like a cross between an overweight male biker and a circus midget. Another half block and I remembered that the apparent female had uttered sounds which were no doubt some form of sonic attack. I fled, hoping against hope that the commie phone would not lead me astray and I was rewarded for my faith in the cause by a three dollars an hour hole in the wall marked “Internet Center” across from an HVM and advertising the apparently desirable ability to “Put your Digital Pictures On CD”. It was here that I retyped what I could remember of the lost work on a keyboard which had developed its own ecosystem of disease and was no doubt recording my keystrokes and selling them to the highest bidder in the more upscale F key section where only the most privileged virii could be found. The four clocks hung on the wall seemed not only pointless in this setting seeing as no one with an interest in multiple timezones would be caught in this place but had also all stopped at different times and never had their batteries replaced; it was that or time had stopped entirely within this place which I still was not sure of until a man with no legs wheeled his way by the window and the computer I had selected signaled to me that it was 1:28 PM. I considered buying something from the rack of standard cash-register chocolate bars but thought better of it; it might have been contaminated by the weirdness this place was imbued with and I had already been overexposed. Looking around more fully I realized that I had missed an escalator in my initial assessment and its presence vexed me, here is a picture of it being blocked rather completely by a red wooden object with built in cabinets which had apparently been created as a horrible experiment involving a desk and likely the violation of the Geneva convention as a form of visual torture, evoking confusion in whoever viewed it as the human mind attempted to grasp some facet of its use. I decided that this was the last straw in the place's weirdness and made fast my escape to the sounds of a female Opera singer in the midst of an Opera dedicated to headaches. Despite fears of the place having transported me into a dimension containing further affronts to the laws of furniture and all humans were replaced by a form of insect, I emerged into what at least under casual observation appeared to be where I had left from. I also observed the crowds of downtown Toronto milling about in the bastard child of Shinjuku square and Times square that is the intersection at Younge and Dundas complete with Shinjuku style full square crossing shown here in a picture I took using the superior vantage point of my immense height. These crowds were not the sort of place for one to recover from my ordeal at that digital watering hole of the damned and as I was still without the burger which I had so desperately needed, I decided to continue my quest at Jack Astors. The entrance at the side of the mall, pictured here, I knew would lead me through a terribly designed set of escalators before I would get to my destination at the top of the building and so I past it and followed a rather questionable route to a mysterious back entrance containing an elevator which produced an ambiance of an exclusive nightclub frequented by people who are more important than you as seen in this series of photos. The doors to the elevator slid open and after stepping inside it whisked me away to the fourth floor where I was accosted immediately by a man demanding how I had gotten up there. I replied that the door had been unlocked which seemed to puzzle the man which gave me the opportunity to move past him and further into the restaurant. Here was a burger joint/sports bar that would cater to my needs. I wasn't disappointed as moments later I was whisked away to a prime seat from which I could survey 10 flat panel televisions displaying a rock concert-esque assortment of football and the herd of patrons. Truly it was the haven of the middle-aged white male of the species and they were clearly out in full force on an early Saturday afternoon.
Ordering a Guiness from the short skirted young waitress who obviously thought I was texting, I looked through the menu. I was in no mood for appetizers, cocktails, bar food or the strange assortment of asian food and immediately ordered a Deluxe Bacon Cheeseburger with Angus Bacon on top. Here at last was my quest fulfilled as the waitress brought back a plate containing this. Gazing at it I was struck by the impression of the pinnacle of burger technology as only a teenager, hidden away in the back so as to present a front populated with only pretty young women, can create.
After devouring half of my much desired burger I paused to digest and examine my environment more closely. Indeed, as I looked around while listening to the latest female popular rock with simple beats and incomprehensible lyrics, I noted the chandeliers hung with countless empty tobasco sauce containers and wondered idly how many drunk patrons watching "the game" it had taken to produce them, the chalk boards with pictures of mildly humorous etched onto them to provide a rest for the patron's eye from the nauseating screens of which you could see more than 3 from any angle within the place and the necessary Christ tree to signal that this was indeed the place for its primary audience during this commercial season which began on the second week of November this year and caused throngs of people to suddenly decide that they needed to stay in the downtown core to buy gifts for people out of the desire to appear perfectly normal and forestall all claims to the contrary once the appointed day of exchange arrived, otherwise known as a conscience or guilt aversion mechanism. Yes this was truly the epicenter of the finest modern dining experience for under $20 you could find... that was until I spotted the disco ball.
This hateful sparkling device had no place in this world of testosterone driven sports obsession and family dining. The idea of dancing in such a place was out of the question and the average age of the patrons meant that only a handful in the room would know exactly what connotations of smoke filled discotheque rooms with people dancing like their parents it evoked. No, this object was so out of place here that the feeling of shattering ambiance passed over me like a wave of vertigo. Suddenly I realized the truth. This was no fine eatery of the common man, created by and for a blue collar but a place in denial that the 80's were over. A time capsule hiding beneath the hastily added flair. Take away the screens and you find the pleasing pictures and chandeliers along with the tacky booth seating and wood paneled walls would all look completely at home in a eatery of two decades ago complete with exploiting sexy teens in short skirts as servers to attract customers and a dozen beers on tap.
I felt ill, I had fallen for the bait and now faced an ordeal ahead of me, finishing my meal. I considered running for it but quickly thought better of it. No, I thought, that's just what they want me to do, single myself out and I'd end up cornered by one of these hostesses and then I'd be in real trouble. I tried to take a bite of my treasured burger but it was no good, all I could think about was how it all made sense how perfect and wholesome it had been as it was from an era before the dawn of the great McSupremacy had sucked the soul from the burger as we know it today. I hung on to the Guinness as an anchor, here was something altogether separate from this madness. I jumped as the waitress spoke from behind me and nervously cut her off and asked for the bill a bit too anxiously, appearing not to have noticed, I could tell she suspected something. I was sweating and a headache had creeped up on me during the short interplay and I kept taking nervous sips of my drink and stealing glances at the other patrons over its rim. An age later the bill arrived and I snatched its leather carrying case from the girl. Waiting for her to move on before I opened it, I jammed money into the thing and tried to act casual as I walked what seemed like a mile to the front entrance. Carefully I picked my way between tables and occupied chairs until the urge to simply smash them aside in my haste was almost unbearable until...
I was out! Elated, as I was I nearly tripped on the escalator down to the next level before I took hold of myself. By the time I made it to street level it was 3:50 PM and I had regained my composure. Having been awake for more than 12 hours I deemed it a good time to make a strategic retreat from this dangerous trip back to the stronghold of my Kensington Apartment where I could regroup. A nearby streetcar provided me with a ready means of escape and the ride passed surprisingly without incident and so I was unprepared for the religious assault which awaited me at the corner seen in this video which reveals the church's plan to convert heathen asians, no doubt in an attempt to gain their hypnotic powers that I myself had encountered mere hours before. After capturing this shocking footage, I hurried off to my apartment encountering no further points of interest. I checked the mail and pounded up the stairs and into my apartment, another day survived in the nuthouse and the cat hadn't crapped in the bathtub again, all in all I call it a successful day.
The Fumon
As it is November, we're well into the days of dwindling sunlight and all that it entails for all our mood levels. Personally it's put me into a rather introspective and slightly confused mood, though the cold plus the cold medication for the past two weeks probably didn't help, and I've been waffling about decisions more than usual.
So today I waffled myself into not going to class and instead I am organizing some finances from the last few roadtrips I went on. While I was going through my records in Google Apps, I came across a curious document which appears to be an experiment in liveblogging I performed from my Android ADP1 dev phone written around this time last year and I have decided to transcribe the strange series of words here (sans the mentioned media) in its entirety and edited only for formatting, for benefit to the record of surreal events in the history of humanity.
Note that the following was written at a time where I had no friends in the city, was not going outside except for absolute necessities, had lived alone for 3 years and had recently decided that Hunter S. Thompson was the greatest author to ever live. Naturally, the reader may notice a few strange characteristics in the writing. I am all better now...
On Saturday, November 28, 2009, Fumon «xxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com» wrote:
It was 8:11 AM when I reached the door of my apartment. By the time I had finished typing that and locking the door it was 8:12. I had woken up 5 hours earlier at 3 something after having completed a stint of nearly 24 hours of service in the land of Morpheus – the one who rules dreams as opposed to the one who wears dark sunglasses and says “Neo” a lot... though he was probably in there somewhere – and had, in the time it took for the sun to come up, decided that today was going to be a wretched day.
An hour after that I had decided that it would be an alright day as long as I could find a McDonald's(c) burger within the next 10 minutes. It was then that I remembered that normal people like to eat a meal called “breakfast” at this time and that, short of interacting with someone using a weapon of some sort, this was not to be. So, after further brain consultation, I decided to go out. The where wasn't important and neither was the path taken to get to it.
At this point in the narrative, I had reached Burger King and had attempted to order a burger – a triple wopper I had decided - only to discover that even here in the feeding trough of the anti-McNaming scheme do they follow this outdated standard. I turned down a coffee and decided to type those sentences to vent my newfound contempt for this place and to seriously aggravate the staff by loitering near the front typing without buying anything, that would show them for quashing my morning burger dreams. Here is a picture I decided to take immediately after this semicolon; look at those concerned staff.
Afraid that some crack squad of ninja Burger King employees were moments from killing me, I fled the court of the king of haphazard interior color schemes and headed east along College street. By the time I finished typing that, this is what I saw; the man looked back briefly before no doubt deciding that his rights to personal privacy being violated blatantly for an unknown reason – admittedly for all parties save the reader at that point – wasn't worth the ensuing legal battle. A one legged black man I intended to take a picture of asked me for directions but politely declined the aforementioned photography. This after I gone through the trouble of booting up google maps could only be attributed to his staunch liberalism intervening unlike the man earlier.
I decided to turn down McCaul st. at this point but a man apparently saw this as a form of social masonic code of some kind and asked me how I was and added what he probably thought was a witty and original Canadian “buddy” to it. I searched my mind for the appropriate response code and selected to mumble something resembling a “mmaritem” which produced the desired effect of the man's departure from my presence. As I finished describing that complex interplay for the benefit of the youth readers, I had reached College and University and wasted no time in noting this earning me a complete lack of strange looks.
I took this as a sign to turn my course south into the bowls of this city's financial district to see if I couldn't find some of the rare and mysterious white excrement which you can never adequately explain when you see it in snatching glimpses between the folds of the one-ply toilet paper you bought on sale at walmart as the mass spins down into what today's people assume to be oblivion; little do those same people realize that, at least this far into the cement & concrete jungle/nuthouse, it is filtered and evaluated by machines and workers for reclaimants and flows into some place which is connected with the ocean or the supply to the people of that same city and in an ever expanding and exponential fashion touches everyone on the planet as it gets drunk by billions in minute quantities and put into recycled toilet paper and rubbed over more peoples assholes. Think about that next time you pinch off a loaf or indeed say or do anything as the same rules apply to everyone and everything to some degree either through boring physics and entropy or through the endlessly entertaining games of broken telephone and “he says she says” that this fine species of ape has honed to it's primary skill since it's dawn: your shit touches the entire planet.
~~~~ Fumon Note: I have no idea what the hell I am talking about here but after lengthy analysis (2 minutes) I have decided it has something to do with an intense dislike of gossip at the time.
Either that or temporary psychosis. ~~~~~
It was at this point, 9:21 after meridian to be only partly irrelevant in precision, that I had been sitting on a bench on the divider between the two lanes of University Ave. near a memorial to the fallen something or others to which I put a hand to heart before moving to said bench. I could feel the mighty rumble of the subway underneath through my parked buttocks every few minutes or so as it whizzed through its subterranean tunnels like a herd of running investment bankers banished to the inky depths to become molemen – or molepeople as they supposedly would insist on being called – and feed on and covet the dropped items of passengers; victims of the economic times people would respond when the topic came up in conversation around the watercoolers to be replied to with muttered agreement and sympathy. It's funny that the utterance of this incantation can evoke such unanimous a response from so many separate parties in both Canuckville and Jesusland similar to other recent additions to the lexicon of excuses like hurting the environment or supporting the troops. I say excuse but perhaps it is the wrong term, the issue I have with sayings like this doesn't concern their factual credibility, their truth is only occasionally questionable and then only in hind sight or liberal blogs. No I take issue with their use as blanket terms that serve to cover and gloss over the whole story that just got told and brand it to be filed away and defined as just another of “those” stories, another line in the tally of whatever cause it associates with. It's the lost stories I cry about at night, the grains of history lost in the desert. This is the way we comfort and shield ourselves from the cruel deep realities of life, with labels and catch phrases we can reduce things to the level where we can keep going with the everyday and fit it into our worldview without stopping to think of the implications of what we just heard, more noise than thought, understanding nowhere to be seen. More people's shit touching everyone in the world and just like the shit in your coffee you go right on
drinking without a single thought.
Speaking of coffee, I had by this point wandered into a Tim Horton's which for the benefit of those of you from Jesusland I should explain is like a Starbucks but without the heaping of smug and you can still order a large coffee completely absent of a barrista – e equivalent volume of human blood – another difference from Starbucks - I was rewarded with a paper cup full of wakejuice which I removed to the safety of an unbussed table near the window. The seat was still warm from the previous occupant's time spent there consuming what appeared to be a carton of chocolate milk and the matching half of a tunafish sandwich which remained. I moved the tray to another nearby table while thinking of the grim fate which awaited the morsel in the establishment's garbage can before being whisked to the dump of eventual decomposition; another noble sacrifice by this species which evolved from the pedigree of sliced bread to form a whole spectrum of breeds from the common ham to the fashionable BLT to the surprisingly delicious and rare ruban – the true breed of which has become endangered in recent times and has endured only through the unpure line of western condiment instead of the russian dressing to which it owed its beauty – to the radical european sub or hogey, all of which based on a design which can be consumed with a only a single appendage – including a foot as it turns out – and which fits in every human hand and developed without a committee or standards organization to enforce the specs or even a patent – though it most likely has been by now by someone with a remarkably small penis and a combover though I am too horrified by the idea of patents to find out, google is your friend – truly a wonder. Today the idea would be bought as a takeover of a start up and then rebranded the “iWich” by marketing where it would then be released with ads occupying the outside of the bread with the inside containing an end user licence agreement which would begin with “By biting into this sandwich you agree to the terms...”, different fillings would be optional accessories and all models would come with the essential ability to play MP3s. Clearly, this is progress. A reminder that all original ideas contained here are property of my brain and interested executives, you know who you are, should contact my people of which I have none.
At this point an asian couple who had sat down at the table and were reading some sort of paper with words on it – a history teacher had called it a newpaper or something though actually seeing one, the paper looked quite old and grey to me, doubtless the discount option likely with only a paltry 1GB of MP3 storage – next to me asked me to take a picture of them. Having done so and sat back down I was surprised when after a minute the man asked me to take another picture of the pair. Having satisfied him for the moment, I took the chance to escape before he could corner me with more photographic requests by leaving, my coffee having long since been finished. It was 11:32 and the streets showed further signs of life and having been brainwashed by the asian man I took more pictures of the street, shown here. This was a mistake. I had been writing this text in an email addressed to myself on my cellphone and as a further example of the dangers of associating with the Chinese it had turned communist and decided for me that it would remove the last hour of progress and no amount of swearing or threats would phase the electronic socialist. So, deciding quickly to cut my losses I tried the tactic of asking said device where the nearest internet cafe was and after some time considering this it thankfully replied in the enigmatic way in which these devices are prone to and I began to walk towards the intersection of Younge and Dundas.
Enroute I encountered the kind of sight which takes a few moments to travel from the optic nerve to the brain and from there proceed to sneakily burn its way into your memory before you have any idea what you've just seen, I was nearly a half block away before I realized that I had passed what could only technically be called a woman wearing a plain green skirt, leather boots, black hose, a top of a type and fit to her which I could never dream to adequately describe here but featured leather as its primary component, hair the color of regurgitated bile and styled to match along with a face which I first took for a block of wood carved by someone with severe hand tremors and who kept starting over; all of which gave her an appearance almost but not quite like a cross between an overweight male biker and a circus midget. Another half block and I remembered that the apparent female had uttered sounds which were no doubt some form of sonic attack. I fled, hoping against hope that the commie phone would not lead me astray and I was rewarded for my faith in the cause by a three dollars an hour hole in the wall marked “Internet Center” across from an HVM and advertising the apparently desirable ability to “Put your Digital Pictures On CD”. It was here that I retyped what I could remember of the lost work on a keyboard which had developed its own ecosystem of disease and was no doubt recording my keystrokes and selling them to the highest bidder in the more upscale F key section where only the most privileged virii could be found. The four clocks hung on the wall seemed not only pointless in this setting seeing as no one with an interest in multiple timezones would be caught in this place but had also all stopped at different times and never had their batteries replaced; it was that or time had stopped entirely within this place which I still was not sure of until a man with no legs wheeled his way by the window and the computer I had selected signaled to me that it was 1:28 PM. I considered buying something from the rack of standard cash-register chocolate bars but thought better of it; it might have been contaminated by the weirdness this place was imbued with and I had already been overexposed. Looking around more fully I realized that I had missed an escalator in my initial assessment and its presence vexed me, here is a picture of it being blocked rather completely by a red wooden object with built in cabinets which had apparently been created as a horrible experiment involving a desk and likely the violation of the Geneva convention as a form of visual torture, evoking confusion in whoever viewed it as the human mind attempted to grasp some facet of its use. I decided that this was the last straw in the place's weirdness and made fast my escape to the sounds of a female Opera singer in the midst of an Opera dedicated to headaches. Despite fears of the place having transported me into a dimension containing further affronts to the laws of furniture and all humans were replaced by a form of insect, I emerged into what at least under casual observation appeared to be where I had left from. I also observed the crowds of downtown Toronto milling about in the bastard child of Shinjuku square and Times square that is the intersection at Younge and Dundas complete with Shinjuku style full square crossing shown here in a picture I took using the superior vantage point of my immense height. These crowds were not the sort of place for one to recover from my ordeal at that digital watering hole of the damned and as I was still without the burger which I had so desperately needed, I decided to continue my quest at Jack Astors. The entrance at the side of the mall, pictured here, I knew would lead me through a terribly designed set of escalators before I would get to my destination at the top of the building and so I past it and followed a rather questionable route to a mysterious back entrance containing an elevator which produced an ambiance of an exclusive nightclub frequented by people who are more important than you as seen in this series of photos. The doors to the elevator slid open and after stepping inside it whisked me away to the fourth floor where I was accosted immediately by a man demanding how I had gotten up there. I replied that the door had been unlocked which seemed to puzzle the man which gave me the opportunity to move past him and further into the restaurant. Here was a burger joint/sports bar that would cater to my needs. I wasn't disappointed as moments later I was whisked away to a prime seat from which I could survey 10 flat panel televisions displaying a rock concert-esque assortment of football and the herd of patrons. Truly it was the haven of the middle-aged white male of the species and they were clearly out in full force on an early Saturday afternoon.
Ordering a Guiness from the short skirted young waitress who obviously thought I was texting, I looked through the menu. I was in no mood for appetizers, cocktails, bar food or the strange assortment of asian food and immediately ordered a Deluxe Bacon Cheeseburger with Angus Bacon on top. Here at last was my quest fulfilled as the waitress brought back a plate containing this. Gazing at it I was struck by the impression of the pinnacle of burger technology as only a teenager, hidden away in the back so as to present a front populated with only pretty young women, can create.
After devouring half of my much desired burger I paused to digest and examine my environment more closely. Indeed, as I looked around while listening to the latest female popular rock with simple beats and incomprehensible lyrics, I noted the chandeliers hung with countless empty tobasco sauce containers and wondered idly how many drunk patrons watching "the game" it had taken to produce them, the chalk boards with pictures of mildly humorous etched onto them to provide a rest for the patron's eye from the nauseating screens of which you could see more than 3 from any angle within the place and the necessary Christ tree to signal that this was indeed the place for its primary audience during this commercial season which began on the second week of November this year and caused throngs of people to suddenly decide that they needed to stay in the downtown core to buy gifts for people out of the desire to appear perfectly normal and forestall all claims to the contrary once the appointed day of exchange arrived, otherwise known as a conscience or guilt aversion mechanism. Yes this was truly the epicenter of the finest modern dining experience for under $20 you could find... that was until I spotted the disco ball.
This hateful sparkling device had no place in this world of testosterone driven sports obsession and family dining. The idea of dancing in such a place was out of the question and the average age of the patrons meant that only a handful in the room would know exactly what connotations of smoke filled discotheque rooms with people dancing like their parents it evoked. No, this object was so out of place here that the feeling of shattering ambiance passed over me like a wave of vertigo. Suddenly I realized the truth. This was no fine eatery of the common man, created by and for a blue collar but a place in denial that the 80's were over. A time capsule hiding beneath the hastily added flair. Take away the screens and you find the pleasing pictures and chandeliers along with the tacky booth seating and wood paneled walls would all look completely at home in a eatery of two decades ago complete with exploiting sexy teens in short skirts as servers to attract customers and a dozen beers on tap.
I felt ill, I had fallen for the bait and now faced an ordeal ahead of me, finishing my meal. I considered running for it but quickly thought better of it. No, I thought, that's just what they want me to do, single myself out and I'd end up cornered by one of these hostesses and then I'd be in real trouble. I tried to take a bite of my treasured burger but it was no good, all I could think about was how it all made sense how perfect and wholesome it had been as it was from an era before the dawn of the great McSupremacy had sucked the soul from the burger as we know it today. I hung on to the Guinness as an anchor, here was something altogether separate from this madness. I jumped as the waitress spoke from behind me and nervously cut her off and asked for the bill a bit too anxiously, appearing not to have noticed, I could tell she suspected something. I was sweating and a headache had creeped up on me during the short interplay and I kept taking nervous sips of my drink and stealing glances at the other patrons over its rim. An age later the bill arrived and I snatched its leather carrying case from the girl. Waiting for her to move on before I opened it, I jammed money into the thing and tried to act casual as I walked what seemed like a mile to the front entrance. Carefully I picked my way between tables and occupied chairs until the urge to simply smash them aside in my haste was almost unbearable until...
I was out! Elated, as I was I nearly tripped on the escalator down to the next level before I took hold of myself. By the time I made it to street level it was 3:50 PM and I had regained my composure. Having been awake for more than 12 hours I deemed it a good time to make a strategic retreat from this dangerous trip back to the stronghold of my Kensington Apartment where I could regroup. A nearby streetcar provided me with a ready means of escape and the ride passed surprisingly without incident and so I was unprepared for the religious assault which awaited me at the corner seen in this video which reveals the church's plan to convert heathen asians, no doubt in an attempt to gain their hypnotic powers that I myself had encountered mere hours before. After capturing this shocking footage, I hurried off to my apartment encountering no further points of interest. I checked the mail and pounded up the stairs and into my apartment, another day survived in the nuthouse and the cat hadn't crapped in the bathtub again, all in all I call it a successful day.
The Fumon
