Tag: Work

Nearly 25 years ago, I woke with a start in the middle of the night with an excruciating itchiness on my back and shoulders, calves, forearms, even my earlobes. In particular, my palms drove me out of my gourd and I starting doing this thing where the fingers of each hand scratched the opposing palm. This worked fine until I started to draw blood. I stood in the shower to ease the itching. I slathered myself in different lotions. I lay on my back and shimmied around the bedroom floor. Nothing worked to ease the itchiness.

A couple days later I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a dermatologist. It was a high-rent location and all the other “patients” in the waiting room looked as if they were there for their latest botox injection. When the dermatologist saw my back, he made his colleagues drop everything and come in for a look. Then he asked me if I’d be willing to put myself on display for grand rounds at Women’s College Hospital. This was the most exciting thing he’d seen all week. My back was a grade A teaching opportunity.

A biopsy confirmed that I had DH or dermatitis herpetiformis. Celiac disease typically manifests as a gastro-intestinal problem but for a subset of celiacs it produces skin lesions. For some, it’s both. Essentially, it’s an autoimmune disorder and, despite the fact that itchiness doesn’t sound like much of a problem, prolonged itchiness is bloody excruciating. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect the CIA to use in Guantanamo. The solution is to avoid foods containing gluten. This isn’t some kind of lifestyle new-age fad diet; this is necessary to keep people from going absolutely bonkers.

And so I changed my diet. I shifted from a wheat-based Western diet to a rice-based Asian diet, not so difficult since my wife is Tamiko. However, it also meant I had to stop drinking beer. Guinness was out of the question.

That explains a moment of wistfulness as I was walking down Leader Lane past the PJ O’Brien Pub and watched a woman retouching the pint of Guinness on the side of their building. Recently, I went to Ireland with friends and, while everyone else drank Guinness, I ordered pints of Bulmers (Magners) cider. I remember the smell of the drinks to either side of me. The frothy heads. The thick opacity. If drinking beer were a carnivorous act, drinking Guinness would be the equivalent of eating a buffalo steak charred black on a grill.

Then I remembered the itching and the moment of wistfulness vanished.

Sometimes getting there first is everything. I’d been sitting on the couch in front of my TV when the phone rang. A friend who lives in a building south of me was calling while he gazed out the window of his 33rd floor apartment. “Uh, Dave, is your building on fire?” I hadn’t heard any alarms. “There are these huge clouds of black smoke but I can’t tell from here if it’s your building.” I stepped to the window and, just as my friend had said, there were huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky, but to the east of us. I said, “I’ve gotta go.” And then I did what comes naturally. I threw on a coat, slipped on a pair of shoes, and grabbed my camera.

I live in an interesting neighbourhood. Interesting in the sense that there’s always something happening here. The Indian consulate across the road is subject to continual protests, as is the Israeli consulate down the road. Extinction Rebellion protests on my doorstep. Psychotic screams in the middle of the night. Smashed windows in the shops across the road. Last fall, we were in lockdown, not because of a virus, but because of a suspicious piece of luggage outside our front door. The bomb squad detonated it and the concussion rattled my ribcage. The downside of living here, especially during a global pandemic, is that a sense of unease wafts through the air at all hours. The upside is that, if you’re a photographer, the opportunities for interesting shots are limitless.

On this particular occasion, our illustrious mayor, John Tory, whose only distinction from his predecessor is that he doesn’t smoke crack, had ordered a sweep of the homeless from Rosedale Valley. A few days later, someone retaliated by dousing old tires in gasoline and setting the south end of the Sherbourne Street bridge on fire. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a gasoline fire. Arson. Firetrucks were still arriving and fire fighters were running hoses to hydrants. Police had just appeared on the scene and were sorting out how best to contain the situation. I took advantage of the chaos to get close to the scene for my best shots, and then the police pushed me back down the street. You can see me, camera in hand, in the second photo of this CBC article.

Chaos is my friend. Chaos stirs up the conditions of an essential creative foment. Without chaos, I’d stagnate.