Taking the train at 8:00 AM on a Saturday is something else
Feeling not quite conscious in broad daylight in a half empty car just makes the public transportation experience feel somehow more fantastic or romantic or something. Forearm draped over denim leg over beat up sneakers on adjacent seat in your best approximation of confidence; fitted cap on and garish pink earbuds in, you allow your ego a moment of liberty: ‘Haha nice I bet I look so cool right now I bet I look like a character from a movie or an anime or something’ (to this day your interpretation of what it means to be cool is how closely someone or something resembles the cool secondary character in an anime).
There’s of course exactly one soundtrack appropriate for watching the ambitious morning sun soak the east end’s plucky little homes (their humility belying their undeserved seven-figure values in a way that humans should strongly consider emulating). Your cool anime guy earbuds blast the voice of Toronto’s patron saint into your head. There are probably people in this city who don’t listen to Drake. There were also probably people in Inquisition-era Spain who weren’t Catholic. I don’t even listen to music and I listen to Drake.
[If you’re waiting for me to get to the point you can go ahead and close the tab right now because there isn’t one.]
It’s relatively rare that you venture to the real people parts of town. You forget too easily about existence outside the south-of-Bloor-north-of-Queen-east-of-Ossington-west-of-Sherbourne world where you and everybody else have pretended to be real people so hard for so long that you’ve convinced yourselves it’s true. In a lot of ways you’re really exactly the same as the haircuts south of Queen. In other ways they’re nominal adults spending their days doing an impression of hyperproductivity on Bay that actually creates pretty close to zero real value and then whiling away their nights living an extended adolescence on King buying bottle service for no reason and groping your girlfriend so you have to shove them and yell at them and it’s kind of cool because you feel kind of tough but then you feel bad about feeling cool for trying to start a fight because you’re a #ModernMan.
Bus boys create pretty close to zero real value as well, you chide yourself.
Here’s Salinger creeping up on you. He always struck you as kind of a brat, but abruptly you realize that even making that judgment makes you exactly like him. Maybe that was the point of that stupid book. While we’re on the topic of high school English, y’know what was the only good part of Gatsby was the first couple lines: My father always told me, before you judge anybody, remember that they haven’t had all the same advantages you’ve had, or something to that effect. I guess in that context it’s important to remember there’s much more than one kind of advantage. Words to keep around.
It all feels like such an in-between time, and you’re getting the impression that that feeling’s never going to go away because by this point it’s been kicking around for a couple years. You have just enough self-awareness to entertain the possibility that you specifically feel like that because you’ve been pretty useless at existing for a couple years now. Recently, though, you had the privilege of entertaining a woman who had her life the most the hell together of anybody you’d met for a while (maybe since that last woman who really had her life the hell together). And even she talked about being frustrated with not being in the next stage of her life yet, which would itself just be another in-between time. Life’s just so many in-between times, it seems, unless you don’t have anything to look forward to, so maybe the ennui is preferable to the alternative.
This unfortunately doesn’t make it any more impressive to the ladies. Your ma of all people likes to remind you basically every time you call that they’re all gold diggers. Good ol’ ma. The kinder and probably more accurate way to describe the problem is you don’t really have a lot going on right now and how interesting is somebody who’s just sitting around waiting for something? Whatever dude people in this town have too many fucking feelings.
This should be a novel — not your whining about your mediocre love life, but this, like all of this. All this loss and alienation and whatever you call this suspicion that something’s wrong that doesn’t go away. You used to joke that every novel ever written was either about futility or written by Rand, but maybe that’s just the point. Maybe futility is what we have in common and it’s by connecting through that, time and time again through the messed up history of our lost little species, we realize at least we have each other and maybe that’s reason enough to have hope. Or whatever.
At any rate, our specific era of futility hasn’t been canonized yet, this bright, terrifying time of always talking to everybody about everything and having the universe in our pockets. Of broadcasting your soul into the backlit abyss that’s more reliably your companion than anybody else. Somebody should really get around to writing that, before it’s too late.
Spring’s starting to trickle back into town of late, the first couple drops sneaking through a cracking dam before it bursts and inundates the city with light and warmth and joy and life. Child of Ontario and the Northeast that you are you’re most at home in the driving snow, but even you recognize that the 6ix is only really itself when the sun is beaming down on two and a half million beaming patio-goers. Patio weather is Toronto weather. Toronto always promises so much in springtime, and unlike everybody else in the world it never fails to deliver come summer.
The sidewalks thrum with anticipation. It should be a good summer. It should be a good one. What a great little town.
