Tag: Urban

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City Life

Flash Fiction: Janice Takes An Uber to a Coffee Date

Big Ben viewed from Charing Cross, London
Big Ben viewed from Charing Cross, London

We met Janice before when she fell asleep on a subway while on her way to work in Toronto. Join her here for another narcoleptic adventure…

The Uber pulled to the curb in front of the house where Janice rented a basement apartment. She had a date. Sort of a date. She’d met a guy online and they had arranged to meet at a Starbucks for coffee. She could use a coffee. As for the guy. Well. She could use a guy, too.

Janice had an unruly brain and it inserted thoughts into her consciousness whether she wanted them there or not. One such thought, more like an Instagram video than a thought, was a scene of two dogs sniffing each other’s behinds. In a way, that’s what she and this guy were about to do. They would cover it with layers of social niceties—double latte misto blah-di-blah, neutral talk that avoided religion and politics, coded signals of class and income—but peel away the layers and all that remained was butt sniffing. She cursed her brain for throwing this unwanted image into her more conventional hopes for the meet-up.

The guy’s name was Oswald. She’d never known anyone named Oswald. In fact, when she first noted his name, she had swiped past his profile thinking: anyone named Oswald must be a loser. She caught herself mid-thought and wondered if she wasn’t being a bit unfair. It’s not as if Oswald had given himself the name. It was probably a struggle growing up with a name like Oswald. Kids beating you up all the time. High school girls snickering at you as you walked down the hall. He probably had astronomical therapy bills. Janice swiped back to the profile and chastised herself for being superficial.

As the Uber headed down to the Danforth, the side to side sway rocked Janice into a gentle reverie. Her eyes became unfocused and the houses passed in a blur. Waiting at the light to turn right onto the Danforth, people on the crosswalk passed in a riot of colour. Red t-shirts. Yellow t-shirts. All of the colours blending together in a way that reminded her of an expressionist painting.

When the car arrived at the Starbucks, Janice couldn’t remember the intervening time between her wait at the crosswalk and her arrival. And yet she couldn’t remember falling asleep either. She must have drifted into an indeterminate state that suspended all awareness of time passing. She thanked the driver and stepped out of the car. However, she had assumed she was stepping onto the curb whereas she found herself stepping into traffic, almost mowed down by a van going in the wrong direction. 

She experienced a momentary feeling of disorientation, then pulled herself back into the moment and crossed the road. Inside the Starbucks, she stepped straight away to the counter and ordered a tall bold with coconut milk and raw sugar and paid for it with her app. While she waited for the person to fill her order, she surveyed the room and found her Oswald sitting in the corner, lost in his iPhone. She was pleased to note that he was better looking in real life than his dating app photo suggested.

Taking up her coffee, Janice stepped to Oswald’s table and introduced herself. Oswald looked up from his iPhone and said hello and stood and invited her to sit and Janice was utterly smitten if for no other reason than that he spoke with a soft English accent. She told herself not to be so superficial but she couldn’t help herself. Thanks to his accent, Janice could forgive any number of other sins, including his goatee and beret and affected radical student look.

Oswald hoped the location wasn’t too inconvenient.

Janice said it was perfect. She lived on the Danforth which was central to just about everything.

Oswald gave a quizzical look. The Danforth?

You know, Greektown.

Oswald shrugged. I’m just a Yorkshire lad. I don’t know where anything is.

Janice gazed out the window behind Oswald and noted a black cab passing on the left side of the road. Oh god, she said, I’m not in Toronto, am I?

Oswald smiled. You’re on Berkeley Street. I’m afraid if you turn right out that door, and turn right again at the corner, you’ll find yourself at the back end of Buckingham Palace.

Janice pushed back her chair and stood. I really need to be going.

Oswald stood as well, taken aback but doing his best to suppress hurt feelings. You can hop on the tube if you like. Around the corner. Green Park.

Oh god, not another subway. Who knows where I’ll end up. As she left the coffee shop, she turned to Oswald and said: It’s not you; it’s me. She knew how that sounded, but it was the truth.

Categories
City Life

Condo Living

Voyeuristic night view of people in condominium units.

He stood in the hall, dressed only in his scuffed bedroom slippers, white T-shirt stained down the front, and tartan pyjama bottoms with the frayed cuffs. Muffin-top isn’t how he would’ve described the way his gut hung over the slack elastic waistband, but Elaine was given to using the term and he’d never come up with decent rebuttal. His only hope for self-respect lay in the possibility that his T-shirt would obscure the girth.

He stood in front of the adjacent neighbour’s door—#2307—and listened to the sounds of a party raging from the other side: an indistinct thrum of voices and music punctuated at random by a piercing laughter or the bark of a dog. Elaine had sent him next door to tell them to tone things down since tomorrow was a work day and she needed to get a decent night’s sleep if she wanted to be on her game. It was a matter of consideration. If the neighbours didn’t quiet down, then Elaine said they’d have no choice but to speak to the concierge and, from there, maybe the police.

He’d never met the neighbours. They were new. He’d seen them only from a distance and so had formed no impression. But Elaine thought she had a good idea what they were like: young, she said, barely more than teenagers, recently let loose in the world and still a little wild. It was like parenting, she said, draw clear lines and then demonstrate that you mean to enforce those lines. He thought Elaine’s parenting comment ironic given the way their own children had turned out. And now she wanted him to inflict his prodigious parenting skills on neighbours he’d never met, who may or may not be young, who may or may not be straight, who may or may not be sober, who may or may not be in a hostile mood, who may or may not be skilled when it comes to wielding baseball bats. So went his thoughts, skittering off to the very worst corner of the mental room where he organized his vast collection of horrible outcomes.

He’d knock on the door and after some yelling from the other side, a muscled man in a wife beater would pull the door back and laugh at the pathetic figure in shambling bedclothes. He’d stutter his way through a badly prepared speech after which the new neighbour with the giant biceps would tell him to go fuck himself and then slam the door. He held his fist poised at eye level, readying himself to rap on the door, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter.

Fuck it, he thought, and he returned to his own apartment. He held his fist poised at the level of his muffin-top, readying himself to turn his own door knob, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter. But he paused, and in that instant, however brief, he discovered that he had no idea which confrontation he dreaded more: the one with a neighbour he’d never met, or the one with a woman he’d called his wife for 35 years.

The building had a common terrace on the 4th floor, so he rode the elevator down in his bedroom slippers, gazing at his shabby reflection in the elevator’s mirrors. It was dark on the terrace and he was alone. He settled onto a lounge chair, tilting it back so he could gaze at the few stars still visible through the city’s light pollution. But that meager collection of stars was enough to set his mind adrift to far worlds and alternate realities, places where men could wear fresh up-to-date clothes and knock on a stranger’s door in a way that sounded confident.

Categories
City Life

Ghosts in the Landscape

Long pinhole exposure of a Go Train whizzing over the Don River on its evening run.
Evening commute up the Don Valley north of Pottery Road

I set up my tripod and frame a shot of railway tracks across the Don River. I use a 50 mm lens, then swap it out for a pinhole attachment that is roughly the equivalent of a 50 mm lens. I say roughly equivalent because pinhole lenses aren’t quite as precise as modern lenses. Technically, they aren’t even lenses. They’re apertures. To bastardize Leonard Cohen, they’re how the light gets in. But the light gets in unfocused so the images are blurred. And since so little light gets in (which is why I have to use a regular lens to set up the shot), the shutter has to stay open longer. How long is a matter of guesswork. In this case, I leave the shutter open for 135 seconds, which means that the train passing through my frame comes and goes all in one exposure. It leaves its traces in the blurred lines of the lights rushing past.

A commuter train like this carries how many people? 1000? 2000? There they are, rushing home after a long day at work, rumbling up the Don Valley to points north of the city. If I made this shot with a regular lens, you might be able to see faces gazing out of the train’s windows. Even then, because it’s dark and because the train is moving fast, the faces would appear blurred, almost ghostly. But with the pinhole lens, we can’t see the faces; the best we can do is infer their presence from the blurred lines where we would expect to see faces.

Whether or not we see ghosts in our frame depends very much on the shutter speed we use. Something analogous can be said when we gaze down a city street. A cursory glance is like a modern lens: we freeze the scene in an instant and have no sense of time passing. But a long hard look that engages the imagination and invokes deep time functions more like a pinhole lens and reveals how the street is inhabited by ghosts.

I offer the major intersection closest to my home as an example of how that works: Sherbourne and Bloor in Toronto. Today, the intersection is a hotbed of construction as condominium towers go up one after another. It’s hard to see the ghosts for all the concrete. But the writer, Hugh Hood, tells how, when he was a boy, Hooper’s Pharmacy stood on the southwest corner where we now have a Tim Horton’s. He remembers how a man spoke in a friendly way to the pharmacist, then walked onto the Sherbourne Street bridge and jumped to his death.

Long before that, from 1839 until the 1860s, a military blockhouse stood in the middle of the present-day intersection. It could accommodate 44 soldiers and was put there in response to the rebellion led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Looking even further back in time, before the first white settlers, we can imagine how Indigenous people used Rosedale Valley for transport, passing immediately beneath the site of the future blockhouse. And looking further still, we can see how melt waters from receding glaciers cut the deep ravine that would later become Rosedale Valley.

What we see depends entirely on how long we leave the shutter open.

Categories
City Life

Where Does Grease Go?

Pumping Grease, Yonge & Wellesley, Toronto

There are many things about the modern world I don’t understand. The restaurant business is one of those things. When the guy comes to pump all the grease out of the fryer, where does it go? Yes, it goes through a hose and into a tank on the back of a truck. But what happens after that? How does he dispose of it? This is one of life’s mysteries.

I don’t have an answer to my question, but I do have an imagination, which means that the lack of an answer is no great impediment. I wonder, for example, if maybe the cooking grease gets sold to manufacturers who turn it into capsules that get resold to health food stores as the latest omega epsilon z.27 rejuvenation regimen. Why not? We already do worse. Slaughterhouses sell cow hooves to make gummy bears. (Why do they never make gummy cows?)

It reminds me of a pair of decorative elephants that sit on a shelf in my living room. I inherited them from a great uncle. They revolt me, but I feel compelled to keep them close at hand as reminder of what a monumentally stupid species we are. The elephants are carved from ebony but the tusks are ivory. Real ivory. In other words, somebody killed an elephant to provide some of the materials to produce a decorative figure of an elephant. Somebody cut down a utter miracle to support the creation of mediocre disposable crap.

But that doesn’t help me answer the question at hand.

Do we dump the grease into Lake Ontario? Do we pour it into mine shafts along with the spent fuel rods from our nuclear power stations? Do we store it in rusty barrels and bury them somewhere beneath the tundra? Do we mix the grease into tailing ponds with all the heavy metal by-products from the manufacture of our lithium ion batteries? What? Please tell me. I want to know.

Categories
City Life

Changed Priorities Ahead

"Changed Priorities Ahead" sign in front of St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh

Strictly speaking, this photograph shouldn’t be included in my Cop26 Glasgow series because it’s a shot of a sign in Edinburgh with St. Mary’s Cathedral in the background. However, I think the sign’s message is fitting to the occasion.

As a Canuck, I had never seen such a sign before. Fortunately, Transport Scotland, in cooperation with the UK’s three other regional governments, has kindly posted its Traffic Signs Manual on Scribd. We find an explanation in Chapter 8 – Traffic Safety Measures and Signs for Road Works and Temporary Situations. Although Chapter 8 runs to 229 pages, if we dig into the document, we find an explanation on page 43. Basically, in the case of a street that can accommodate only one lane of traffic, traffic from one direction gets priority and traffic from the other direction has to yield. Unless, of course, a temporary sign advises that the priorities have been changed.

When I first made this shot, I thought maybe I could use it as a commentary on the way the spiritual life forces us to change our priorities. But now, as we come to recognize that certain of our habits have brought not just us, but all life, to the brink of an existential cliff, the image suggests to me that we need to rethink those habits. Now, this image speaks to me less of the spiritual life than of the practical matter of sustaining biological life. To the extent it invokes the spiritual life, it does so by calling on religious institutions to support us in our efforts to rework how we live in relation to one another, to all living creatures, and to the planet at large. This is a matter of justice and, as I view it, religion that doesn’t serve the ends of justice has no place in our future.