Cabbage soul

Kayaking on Lake Ontario was pretty nice. No wind but some interesting waves from all the big boats. Lots of birds. Passing right under the landing path for the abomination of the island aeroport, which was neat. And of course it's such an incredibly beautiful view of Toronto coming back from the Islands. The CN Tower may be a big awful eyesore, but the Toronto skyline taken as a whole is better for it. More depth.

Got some lovely time with Gigi and Lady and Gigi's fiancé last night. Walked from his condo to Luke Duke's place this morning, going past my old place through Cabbagetown on the way. Cabbagetown is probably the first neighborhood I've ever really loved and it's changing; I'm not frightfully comfortable with it. It's next to Regent Park and has a lot of crackheads wandering around, and that used to keep out the wrong class of people - you know, young urban professionals who move into a cool neighborhood because it's cool and then spend the next ten years writing angry letters to drive all the coolness out - kept out the Starbucks, in short; Cabbagetown sort of maintained this sense of cool and community since time immemorial, balanced between sketch and class, resisting anodyne gentrification in a way no other Toronto neighborhood I'm aware of, besides maybe the Junction, ever managed.

Well. There's a Starbucks there now, because Regent Park is being overhauled into a mixed income development, the crackheads are being slowly pushed out and the yuppies are moving in in droves. But the Starbucks is standing completely empty. Instead the yuppies are cluttering up Jet Fuel, where the bike couriers still go and where I had to wait ten minutes for my coffee, and the Tamil bakery up the street that does the strange cheese pastries, which I had a horrible 30 seconds thinking has closed until I saw in my desperation it had expanded into much nicer premises three doors down.

I'm hoping against hope the spirit of Cabbagetown will prevail.

Thoroughly terribly contemptible

Nice to be back in Toronto, up to a point. Heaven knows I don't consider Brussels a paragon of civic awesomeness and it's great to be back where there are so many Asians with their delicious, delicious restaurants, but this city has its own elements of shitholery that instinctively perhaps, because I'm my grandmother's granddaughter, I'm finding it pretty easy to be judgemental about. Case in point: you want me to pay $2.75 a ride for that piece of shit public transportation system? What? $2.fuckin75? Are you serious? You pay half that to be wafted around any major European capital, on much less circuitous, crippled and crowded routes, London excepted of course but then London is a bit of an exception to everything decent, that fucking shopping mall.

Kayaking with my nephew on Lake Ontario though - Brussels doesn't offer anything like that. I've already made the F-word promise we'd go on a kayaking holiday as soon as we can after I get back, which might be awhile because I'm going to Turkey almost immediately for work. Tough life.

Catharsis

So it's a lovely day and I'm off to go kayaking again, this time to see how far up the La Vase river I can get in Jemima, the boat I bought last week, which was not designed for seeing how far one can get up a river, being 14.5 feet long. And in terms of following the historical trade route portage, which I have no intention of doing this year, and little interest in doing next, I'm not really heading in the right direction, going upstream from the end, Champlain Park at Lake Nipissing, instead of starting from the beginning, Trout Lake (home of the monster, which had the good manners not to eat me on countless daytime and moonlit dips).

But it doesn't matter; in its lower reaches at the moment, the river has no current at all, especially as the lake is so high right now, the highest I've ever seen - the lower river is just some lazy loops through startlingly beautiful countryside, where yesterday I saw a grebe, a muskrat, some weirdo non-diving duck with a red head, and loveliest of all a very pretty doe, who I surprised drinking from the river just a couple of meters away from me, and who stared me down in evident shock and bewilderment with impossibly big black eyes until I passed her, at which moment she booted soundlessly away.

First, though, I have to sit here and finish this blog entry, because I have to have a morning shit before I leave, so I don't have to hurry back at any point. It's a bit odd but I'm absolutely uncomfortable taking a shit in the wilderness. I wonder if that's just me or if everyone is like that, and I wonder if the revulsion to the prospect has any evolutionary remnants mixed up in it from a time when we weren't at the top of the food chain and were afraid of being tracked by predators.

Anyways. Kayaking is lovable for a lot of reasons, and I could go on about them ad nauseum, and no doubt will some other time. But probably the most lovable thing about it is the degree to which it's literally and figuratively cathartic. My bad moods can never stand up to the first twenty minutes of paddling, particularly in such a lovely place as this (damn, my childhood in this fucking arse-end of the world would have been nicer if I'd had a boat!), and I do some really great thinking, accepting, and moving on whilst on the water. And I don't know if it's because of the nature of the physical exercise or because of the mental relaxingness of it all, but the body becomes pretty content, after half an hour or so, to start signalling it's ready to get rid of anything superfluous in there (hence the necessity of taking the morning shit before starting out).

This manifests itself most obviously, in me, with great rupturing belches that echo through the calm of the tranquil northern Ontario morning, blending in seamless harmony with the crickets, frogs, and birdsong - the tranquil northern Ontario morning being full of the jay family, particularly a bumper crop of blue jays this year, whose raucous loud calls are about as pleasant, objectively speaking, as a young woman belching.

The ones I've loved the longest

Actual dialogue from this weekend:

Mistress La Spliffe: I'm pretty sure he's not gay.
High School Buddy: What are you basing that on?
MLF: Partly on him telling you he's not gay.
HSB: Well, he just came up to me spontaneously and said "I'm not gay," why would he have done that if he wasn't gay?
MLS: Maybe because you'd been saying that you're sure he's gay when he was sitting behind us at the wedding table.
HSB: No.
MLS: You were speaking really loud.
HSB: Oh.

The shocking thing about that exchange was that as far as I could tell I was way the drunkest.

Back in North Bay now, although in a way you could hardly tell; London (Ontario) and North Bay are sister cities in drabness, poor roads and squatty ugly buildings, London being the larger, obese sister and North Bay being the pregnant 16-year-old sister living in a little trailer. It was a pretty great wedding. Good to see my group from highschool again, and eerie to watch us be us - that group from highschool again - making each other risk pissing ourselves with laughter - even as life and our own wilfulness takes us into all sorts of weirdo directions.

Getting from London back to Toronto, where we dined with Luke Duke and co. before dropping off Elvis at the aeroport, was much less pleasant. Very fucking unpleasant, actually. But that's life, nothing's for free, or even at the price you think it is, and it's over now. Horrible to drop off Elvis at the aeroport, too. I wish we all arrived and left at the same time, all these goodbyes do my fucking head in. And while this blog is obviously all about me and how awesome I am, there was a touch of dialogue between Elvis and Luke Duke I don't want to forget:

Elvis: We've got a really tiny backyard, so we've started guerilla gardening in a vacant lot down the street.
Luke Duke: Careful, that's how Che started out.

And just so he won't feel left out on the blog he doesn't even know exists, and because he, like the other two, is the master of the throwaway line:

Magnum: That's totally gone to shit. You probably guessed how already but I'll tell you all about it after we start drinking.