Dumped at Dupont

No *I* wasn't dumped at Dupont, but for anyone who is even remotely aware of Toronto news, a knapsack full of guns was dumped at Dupont station last week. And though disturbing, I have to admit that it wasn't my first experience with guns in this neighbourhood. Weird right?

So here's the thing. Last summer I made a stop at the Shoppers Drug Mart near a friend's place so I could pop in and pick something up before going out for the night. Or something like that (the details are fuzzy in my mind). The bottom line is that there were 2 guys that pulled up in front of us in a white car, got out and started arguing. And then one of them pulled out a gun. He looked at me and said, "get out of here," and really, who was I to argue? We hoofed it out of there. But the point is that obviously guns are not new to this neighbourhood even though Scarborough and Jane & Finch usually get all the attention.

The strange thing is that just up the street not a 2-minute walk away are luxury mansions, followed closely by Casa Loma and Forest Hill Village. This is not your typical crack-house neighbourhood. I was even contemplating a new condo complex going up next to the Metro Archives (until I saw the floorplans).

Neighbourhoods are funny things. They're fluid and can sometimes change block by block. It's hard to say if this is just spillover from the Junction or something else, closer to home. It is sad though. I do love that neighbourhood and its crazy 60s psychedelic subway station...

Strange, when things go normal...

It's funny, when you're used to things being bad or horrible, when you're used to having anxiety attacks at 7:45 am on your way to work, when employee abuse is something no one even bothers shaking their head at anymore...

It's amazing, when you suddenly find yourself not the personal slave of your boss - who is accountable to no one, and you're finally free to do what you were educated to do, and appreciated for your intelligence and what you can offer, not your drone-like ability to follow direct orders to the letter under some nightmare version of micro-management hell

Suddenly the weight begins to lift from your shoulders... it's phenomenal. Suddenly you're fabulously fantastically incredibly happy, peaceful, free, confident, hopeful, satisfied. Your euphoria, however temporary, is something you're convinced you had to suffer through to gain - you will never again be ungrateful - you've finally earned this, you deserve it, and now when you sleep, it's straight through the night, no longer waking in a cold sweat, drenched crown to toe.

Sometimes there just are no words...

I can't say exactly why the Alicia Ross case has disturbed me on such a deep level from the very beginning. Maybe because she's so close to my age, or because her home is not so far away from mine, or that friends of friends' relatives knew her, went to prom with her. Maybe it was that huge adopted family of hers and the pain I could sense in their every strained word, or the massive number of volunteers that turned out to look for her. In the end it was her electric smile, her grand plans and adventurous spirit, and the way that all of us that didn't know her got to feel like we did, that really affected me. As of now, the 31 yr old next door neighbour has turned himself in and her remains have been found at TWO different locations. Really, there's not much more to say, is there? May she rest in peace and may her family find peace.

Alicia Ross, your vivaciousness and strength will be remembered.

Subway Psychos

I guess when you ride the subway twice a day, things just happen. You think to yourself, hmph, there's always a 'medical emergency' or an 'emergency situation' somewhere on a different part of the system, and it's never on your train, well, that is, until it *is* on your train, and then it's sort of hard to believe.

A few weeks ago something finally did happen on my train, and in my train car specifically.

It began when I boarded and noticed a group of people standing in a wide circle around a section of seats. I didn't think much of it, except for some laughing that sounded a bit off, until I heard the banging begin.

I noticed that people seemed to be getting upset and there was a palpable tension in the air. Then the clipped hard banging started. I looked over and a red-faced man in sunglasses had slipped his hand into his duffel bag, pulled out a red plastic ball and begun playing floor hockey in the train car. Except that he wasn't really playing. He was muttering under his breath, cursing at people and generally terrifying them. And that was all before he even started actually swiping at people with his raised hockey stick.

Yup, it's true. And what's more, the bizarre smell that had permeated the train seemed finally to have an origin. In between harrassing train riders and threatening violence with a hockey stick - barely missing some peoples' legs and faces - he was holding a crumpled up ball of newspaper to his nose and mouth and deeply inhaling what smelled like paint thinner.

Everyone was nervous. Should we press the yellow emergency strip or not? No one had ever experienced anything like this before. Was this really an emergency? Would we get in trouble for stopping the train? Then he nearly hit a teenage girl in the face with his hockey stick, on purpose, with malice, and we'd finally had enough. I pressed the strip. That was it. We were approaching Yonge-Sheppard station and the train slowly came to a halt.

We expected TTC staff to come running, paramedics waiting, trying to reach our car with urgency to help with our 'emergency'. Nothing like that happened. A good 2 or 3 minutes passed before a TTC employee came sauntering by our car, asking what was wrong. It was pathetic. And disturbing. What if someone had gotten hurt? What if someone had needed urgent medical attention?

Meanwhile, our subway nutcase had stealthily snuck out of the train and was playing cat and mouse around the platform with some of the teenage girls who had been riding in the car and who were trying to do their civic duty by keeping an eye on him so he wouldn't 'escape'. An additional TTC person finally showed up, not obviously in any sort of hurry either and asked what had happened and asked us to point out the 'attacker'.

Seconds later the subway readied to depart again, trundling along on its rush hour path, no one was asked to remain behind to give descriptions or information to security or police. It was as if this was business as usual and just something to sweep under the rug without follow-up. It certainly didn't raise my confidence in the TTC system or its ability to deal properly with emergency situations.

Not 3 days later another incident occurred nearly resulting in a similar situation. I had noticed a guy talking sort of loudly to a much taller man next to him. I assumed they knew each other and were just joking around. Until I looked carefully at the tall guy's body language. He wasn't responding, he was trying to ignore the loud guy. Finally I heard a raised voice say, "Don't touch me man!". The short guy started laughing, goading the tall guy by prentending to touch him. Then he sauntered over my way and started chatting up some young girls. Saying inappropriate things to them. Some young guy, good samaritan that he was, tried to distract this nutcase by diverting his attention away from the girls and talking to the guy. But the guy wasn't having any of it. He tried touching the girls, at which point a man in a nice suit got up and told him that no one was interested in hearing what he had to say and that he couldn't just go around touching people.

The nut leached onto the suit guy, and says, "What do you do for a living? I bet you're a lawyer in that nice suit of yours. Doesn't he look like a lawyer?" The suit man could barely restrain himself, "It's none of your business what I do, it doesn't matter." "I bet you're a Jew aren't you? All lawyers are Jews," continues the nut. "So now that makes a difference to you too? What does it matter to you what I am?"

The nut started trying to touch the suit guy and swipe at him. And then we arrived at Finch station and the nut was sort of herded off the train by everyone. Still talking, still being inappropriate, but thank goodness, off the train. I don't doubt that if we hadn't gotten to Finch just then, someone would have pressed the yellow strip.

I don't even think it was a full moon that week...

A man with a plan - subway musings cont'd

It's really amazing how much you can learn about a person in the space of a 15-minute subway ride. It began on the platform at College station - this young guy asks me, apologetically, if he's on the northbound platform. I told him that indeed he was, and he laughed embarrassedly, explaining that he wasn't 'from around here'. I told him not to mention it, that people ask things like that all the time, and asked whereabouts he was originally from. And so began one of the more interesting conversations I've had in a while...



It turns out this 29 year old guy is an oil rigger from Alberta, and is in town visiting his girlfriend. In the course of the conversation which lasted his full trip between College and Eglinton stations, not only did I learn a lot about oil rigging and the industry, but I also learned the subtle difference between boys and men, how working long and hard can build character and drive, and the shocking difference between the pampered middle-upper classes reeking of entitlement vs. the culture that fosters tough love and learned/earned responsibility and respect from its children.

Now obviously these are huge generalizations and blanket statements. And of course this doesn't mean that Alberta has no spoiled bratty boomerang 20-30 something's, but it does give one pause.

At 18 or 19 this guy (I never got his name, only a warm, friendly, genuine handshake partnered with a 'nice to meet you' as he dashed out the subway nearly missing his stop) was working in construction for his father who 'builds houses'. His co-workers constantly complained that he was being given unfair preferential treatment because he was the boss' son, and his father went to opposite extremes to disprove it. Fed up with dealing with it, he took a short course in rigging, which consisted mainly in safety issues, and then began his real training 'on the job'.

He complained that at one point he got a loan from his father in order to buy a car, and when he forgot to pay his father that month's payment on the exact date, the very next morning the keys to his car had disappeared off his nightstand and he was forced to scrounge and borrow money from friends until he could pay them back with his next pay cheque. Definitely character building...

But the oil rigging paid off. He's been to Nigeria, Venezuela, and done work at Newfoundland's Hibernia. He was supposed to do a short stint in Russia near St. Petersburg but that was only until the girlfriend came along. I didn't ask how they met, but the reason he'd been downtown that day was to put a deposit down 'on some jewelry' for her. That it seemed so sweet and thoughtful, and decided and without fanfare, might say more about my own state of cynicism and jadedness than anything else. A man who knows what he wants and isn't going to mess around once he's found it. No dithering about it. No fear of commitment.

He says he's gone back and forth between Alberta and Toronto a few times now, and when I asked, he said that yes, the girlfriend would probably be moving out to Alberta with him. He mentioned that she's a paralegal and deals with real estate, which is apparently huge in Alberta, but that he hopes once she moves over there she'll take some time to think about what she wants to do. 'She likes riding horses,' he said with a wistful smile, 'and I've got a piece of property that I bought that I'd like to build on, and we could get a couple of horses...' The quintessential Marlboro Man.


Now this guy isn't just talking pipe dreams here. What his pipe dream did depict was aspiring to more honest work and investment. $1.2 M would give him just about enough to buy his own rig, start up a crew of buddies from his current team, and contract themselves out or rent out the rig, for about $10M + a year in profit. Now that's dreaming large. I told him to keep pooling with his buddies and buying those lottery tickets.

When I told him how nice it all sounded and how it seemed that he really had things planned out and settled and on a roll, he looked at me with near incredulousness. 'Well, I mean, I'm 29 years old...' as if it was obvious that at that age he needed to seriously think about these things - settling down, starting a family, as if it was obvious and he couldn't understand my amazement. I guess I don't know too many 29 year olds with a plan. Including myself. I found myself wondering if women could be oil riggers...

What I saw today on the subway

Every morning I commute to work. And every morning I try to block out the stench, misery, and abject boredom of my fellow commuters by reading the paper or sometimes, napping.

This morning was different. This morning something happened, which I rarely see. Emotion. A slice of life. Raw and real and intriguing. Life in progress, instead of a sea of drones on the way to menial jobs that suck their souls dry.

First 2 homeless men got on the subway (highly unusual during rush hour when the trains are generally stuffed full of office workers and students). One seemed fairly clean and together and the other looked ravaged. His clothes were filthy, some blood-smeared, he was unshaven and talking to himself, putting his feet up to take over the 2 seats adjacent to him during the morning rush-hour crush.

Shortly thereafter a middle-aged couple, well-heeled and handsome boarded, and stood directly in front of me, blocking my view of the homeless man. He, dark, tall, distinguished looking - carried a large black binder embossed with bold, stark, gold lettering stating simply: Trial Briefing. She, well dressed, with a smudge of pale pink pearlescent lipgloss and gold-rimmed glasses in a pinstripe pant suit, murmured something to him as he clutched the binder under his left arm and wound his right arm around the pole and then around her waist. His reply was inflected with a consoling tone and so, ever the nosy voyeur I looked up from my morning paper, and saw the woman with her head tilted up to the ceiling, her face a model of restraint and control. In the electric glare of the flourescent subway lights I soon saw the two streams of tears that had somehow persisted and managed to escape despite her attempts, and flowed freely down both sides of her face.

The murmuring began again in earnest, and by now I had noted that the murmuring was in French, and I wondered what could possibly be wrong? I thought to myself, what could ever be so upsetting as to induce me to allow myself to cry freely on a subway in the middle of rush hour among dozens of other strangers from which I had no escape?

I thought of all sorts of potential tragedies. Her brother(sister/mother/father) had just died. She and her husband had just decided that morning to get a divorce. She was about to lose her job. Someone close to her had a terminal illness. The trial brief was somehow related to her and the outcome was not predicted to be good.

Of course I left the train none the wiser, but the small drama stayed with me long enough to remind me of the fact that all those drones on the morning trains really are human after all.

In the wake of... the next big thing

It's interesting to note how seeminly innocuous little phrases can become over-used and irritating in our modern times. Linguistic equivalents to "once upon a time" or "it was a dark and stormy night..." can now usually be traced to media conglomerates attempting to coin the next big thing. And we're not talking about the latest from Hans Christian Andersen here... The "next big thing" means money, and lots of it. The next big thing is a marketer's wet dream, a yuppie's morning latte rush, a working parent's nightmare, and so on.

For example, following Sept. 11th, I can personally vouch for being nauseated every time I heard someone say "nine-eleven" or "in the wake of..." In the wake of the tragedy on Sept. 11th, in the wake of the war on terrorism, in the wake of the tsunami, in the wake of Bush's re-election... yes these things trigger instant and carefully constructed pre-programmed clips of horror and tragedy in our minds, but that too means money and branding and economic opportunity for someone, you can be sure.

Along with a surge in blood bank donations, post-9/11 NYC spurred a twisted & masochistically voyeuristic industry of tragedy cum tourism. Mid-westerners, southerners, Americans of all persuasions lined up post-9/11 to ogle the burnt out hole in the ground that used to be the trade towers. Post-9/11, souvenir sellers hawked their wares shamelessly - American flags, twin tower postcards, snowglobes, metallic replicas - as families posed smiling for pictures, the wreckage of twisted metal and human ash as their backdrop. A post-9/11 crematorium as Disneyland.

Yes, all these things are tragic (let's not touch on the whole Bush re-election thing today, which is another post-9/11 phenomenon in the wake of the war on terror), yes seeing those pictures of missing persons on posterboards across South Asia brought flashbacks of nightmarish weeks of staring at missing persons posters in subway stations across NYC, but really (to get back to my original point) in the wake of??? I know I'm being a little anal here but it really does start to grate.

Everything from Bennifer & metrosexual to 'blogging' is up for grabs, and sometimes apparently & mind-bogglingly (mind blogglingly??) even up for inclusion in our dictionaries. When did language go up for sale? When did Fox News and CNN gain permission to co-opt alliteration for the creation of catchy by-lines for monstrous events that you could then associate with their brand of tabloid TV?

Now I don't know about anyone else, but I personally still hold out some hope that many of these coined terms and phrases will just go away. Die slow and quiet semantic deaths and go the way of 'groovy' and 'bruhaha'. Do we really need to give them credence by incorporating them into our linguistic canons?

Now I realize I'm careening on various tangents (my apologies) regarding over-use as well as illegitimate use and corporate misuse and abuse. However, it seems these days that people have enough trouble getting a handle on our language as it is, without making it snoringly boring, or turning it into a huge ad campaign for every multi-billion dollar corporation this side of globalization.

What with grammar & spelling being barely taught in our public schools and Microsoft Word editor taking over in the fast-tracked dumbing down of our education and writing skills, do we really need the added complication of new words that will probably be obsolete within a generation or the flogging to death of terms until they lose their meaning altogether?

The same way vinyl records & 8-tracks gave way to cassettes which gave way to CDs which gave way to mini-discs which gave way (in what seems like a nanosecond) to MP3s, do we really need to be adding words like "blog" to Webster's? How long do you really think your iPod will be cool? Oh, well you splurged for the 60GB photo one? Ummm... yeah, well in another year it will have a digicam and phone embedded and in 2 who knows, you might be able to start your car and adjust the thermostat in your home with it. Oh and by the way, it probably won't be called an iPod either in the wake of so many new applications - so maybe Oxford should hold off on that one...