5 am and ready for lunch

Jet lag. Home again after a year and a half and no one else is awake. It just struck me that the birthday party I fell asleep three hours before last night is probably still happening somewhere but I don't feel equipped to do anything about that.

Yesterday drove through my old neighborhood, the darling Cabbagetown, to take care of some business with Luke Duke. Past my old apartment. I love Cabbagetown. That was such a great place to live and I was very happy there. Yes, visible signs of drug abuse all over the place; yes, lots of people wandering around who should have been institutionalized one way or the other. But when you live in a market economy, the only cool-ish smack downtown neighborhood a kid like I was can afford a one-bedroom in will be one crack addicts, halfway housers, and the victims of Ontario's criminal budget cuts re. low security psychiatric hospitals can also afford. And when you're as cheap as I am, that's not likely to change with age. Why pay a premium to live in a boring, isolated neighborhood? But perhaps my tune will change when I have children.

Anyways, going back there reminded me how Cabbagetown was just so great. So many restaurants and shops that I loved in one tiny area, that great park, Jet Fuel, everybody who's head's together being pretty friendly, especially by Toronto standards, and a lot of the crackheads being quite decent too. Part of the reason I want to move back to an Anglo country is that I want to live in a neighborhood like Cabbagetown again, and I've never found one in a European city. Saint Gilles has a lot to recommend it - I love living there in a different way - but some Anglo neighborhoods like Cabbagetown still promise big things for people with a good idea, without needing to be historical or hipster-ish or exclusive or expensive or uncomfortable.

Ah, maybe I'm just happy to be at the place that's closer to being home than any other place, unless you can count my man as my place which you can't, because he's a person.