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Princes, Prophets and young sisters of older bitches… How many times have we heard the tired old stories; life changing banishments into the wilds… Struggles with the unfamiliar as character grows; wisdom flourishes, petty obsession for revenge transform into righteous plans, the honorable pursuit of justice! The return, the triumph of goodlyness over badlyness. The people are unchained, rose peddles tossed on the dirty old streets as the vanquished ones parade freedom down, the dirty, dirty old streets…

Then there is the exile of our hero, the exile of a simple, plain old fool. Exiled behind imaginary lines that cross over some of the most beautiful countryside between two of the greatest countries in the history of mankind. Two countries designed with openness in mind… divided by perhaps, even just the remnants of a simple 200 plus year old lingering love & hate for Queen and Country. Meanwhile well over 17 rerun episode of Seinfeld run simultaneously daily on either side of the imaginary line…

Exiled not only geographically, but thrust seven years into his questionable past. Perhaps meant to find the answer to unanswered questions; Reflections on the choices and paths taken… Reflections; his face, face down reflected in the oily pool of muddy water after another night of stumbling and falling while sinking deeper and deeper into this childishly selfish moan of his. Oh, sure there are moments of self realization; the realization that he is nothing but a poor planning looser. Oh, sure there is inspiration; psychotically obsessive dreams of plans and schemes that one after another prove themselves to be nothing more than blind hope that kills the hours as he runs them through the loop in his mind over and over and over again. The taste in his mouth becomes the putrefied flavours of all the good things spinning out of control into conspiracies that keep him locked in the chains formed by the simple fact that he hasn’t come up with one frikin clue of how to work himself out of this particular soaking wet brown paper bag of a serious problem.

You do NOT find yourself when you crash to the bottom of the pit of no hope; what you find is an ever diminishing group of hands reaching down to help lift you out of the pit prior to this crash. If you miss that last hand, you might as well… Well get used to a long, steady continuous fall… praying for the crash that will finally splatter that last bit of hope that has become nothing more than a big fierce set of dogs jaws placed firmly and with ever increasing pressure over your entire head, body and soul… the hand.

As our hero’s luck would have it, that last hand in this particular fall was the hand that was always held out there in front of him… a steady, if sometimes desperate hand, an always loving hand.. Then another hand; and another… a The Firm but tenuous grip; an abruptly frightening jolt as the descent is slowed… Stopped… The hand tosses the blue rope, a desperate reach, a tug, pulling as hard as one can after the complete exhaustion of unbearable separation. A hug; A hug lights a flame that roars into the inferno that burns this whole silly story into ashes. Only the inflammable nuggets remain in the dust; some glorious; others so heinous, they’ll hold them around if only to remind them of the places they will never return to…

Fearsome quarrels over Anti pasta… Reconciliations over a tiny one inch by two inch picture of paradise on their way to walk the only bridge in town. Almost conjugal visits that keep one alive between moments of absolute obsessive boredom. Visits that each carry joy and a piece of the puzzle they’ll put together once back, back home. Visits that finally allow them to define that one final and crazy mission…

No rose peddles lay before them; the streets are however, wonderfully dirty. I shit on the romantic notions though… As it turns out, exile although indeed a bitch; and, although our heroes may still be in exile; they never really were all that far from home, after all.

And that’s all you will ever hear about that!

I cannot help but wonder… What has become of the outlaw? Daddy was a bank robber, but he never hurt nobody. He just liked to live that way; AND, he liked to steal your money.

J walking across this life of mine, I find myself back in this quite insignificant of places For those of you [in Brooklyn] who did not pay close attention in 9th grade geography, This place is the vast chunk of land just north of Watertown New York. Home to a simple bunch of folk, who much like yourselves are addicted to Survivor, American Idol and polyunsaturated fats. However, unlike yourselves, we continue to look to the Queen as the head of both our political and spiritual well being… Oh, and… we have your fucking oil. All the oil you will ever need! [look it up]

Do NOT roll your eyes back into the hole in your head… this is NOT about that most boring of subjects spoken in what you call America, Canada… this is about You, US. This is about the end of the greatest experiment in human history… this is about the end of that great entrepreneurial exodus from the open sewer that was, IS, and shall ever more be known as what Donald Rumsfeld calls, the OLD Europe. This is about US, US recently apologetic Indian killers…

What has become of US?

Was it really all just simply mythology? Did US really ever exist? I mean, I’ve been taught of the great struggles for greatness… The war of Independence, the war of the States, the fight for human rights, women’s rights… Gay rights, oh for Gods sake let us NOT forget GAY rights? Oh and the rights of some oxyconten pumpin’ right wing wingnuts right to spew, for advertising dollar, right to raisie sometime humorous opinions, but mostly just simple garble over the so called public airwaves. While, so meanwhile the so called smart amongst us smugly, use our rights in a just air of superiority to say, “Well, that’s just dumb”. As is our right.

Did we ever hold a monopoly on progress? After trading in our slaves for corporate run farms and the subsequent subsidies to counteract the deficits run-up while raising corn and cotton with PAID labor… did we manage to improve the human condition? Some might say what we managed to do was to invent a means to sell ourselves, a PR machine… television, the devise, oh so appropriately devised to shout our achievements before we achieved them. Witness Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10. Witness the Ayatollahs blindfolding the end of Jimmy’s failed Presidency.

Eisenhower, a Republican warned… beware the industrial military complex; Nixon, a Republican, ended Kennedy and Johnson’s poorly executed defense against global communism; Lincoln, the FIRST republican president freed the slaves, but more importantly re-stitched together a restless union of over zealous states into a union that would one day defeat the Soviet Union… Speaking of THAT, recall another republican, Ronald Reagan performing a stand up Comedy routine that exposed the Marxist farce and landed us where we are today… Right back where we were 500, 600 years ago. Trying to fight back that third incarnation of mono-theseilogy. Damn Jews! Why couldn’t you just let the gods of Egypt well enough alone.

I have spent the last six weeks without television; So tell me, what’s going on. I saw a fella asking people for change so that he could get something to drink on my street; AND my pal told me about a protest he attended to save a grove of weeping willows along the last stretch of public beach here in the west end of the city of Toronto; but, what’s going on? What’s the latest score in Iraq? Have the murderous Imperial hordes, US imperialistic Christian thugs moved ahead of the Islamo-Faciast yet??? Who holds the body count; which one of us too armed two-legged omnivorous bipedal kings of the food chain life forms are winning the game of killing each other in the name of fake words written by dead poets within the last 2000 years. Oh right, neither… the virus, bacteria, smoking, and car accidents as always, hold the winning cards. All hail Cancer in all it various omnipresent and victorious forms!

The invention of problems seems unstoppable. Our mortgages are too high as the black kid from up the street squeezes the trigger and sets off alarm bells all over the City of Toronto, which has for so many years so smugly enjoyed the blessings as Michael Moores poster boy for a gun free society. Hybrid cars get nowhere near the gas mileage they say they do. Peak Oil looms as we nonchalantly begin to, more frequently BUY our water in bottles rather than just filling a glass from the tap.

This is not a hue and cry. I beg you to do nothing. The Atlantic elevator that shifts the warm tropical waters from the equator towards the cooling influence of the northern icecap has already started to fail. There are those among us who honestly believe that considering that we caused all these problems that we actually have the were-with-all to do something about it. To those folks, I say bully, g’don ya mate, and oh by the way, d’ya know who won last nights match?

NOT A Sam Kinison Scream… No surrender; but more a humorous notion that despite all these glorious FUCK UPS… some form of US will survive. I do truly believe this. I used to believe it would be some nuke soaked three eyed, sterile mutation of our current form; now I believe it may be some oil deprived refugee… struggling to find that last sip of potable water; water for which we all fought and died for in the next last of the that last wars, with Canada no less… that last of the last sips… somewhere just north of Winnipeg, the city where I was born… A city in a province of Canada that holds more fresh water than any other so called country on this Earth. I would tell you the actual location of this water… but then… sorry, my son would have to kill you.

Sometime this week I will be leaving this wretched city… For the next few weeks; or until the “plan” is finally hatched I have decided to park myself in Brockville. The genesis of the idea for this move was my freaky rooming-house land-lady kicking me out after deciding I gave her a bad vibe. If anyone has any thoughts on this bad vibe of mine, please fill me in.

Bad vibe, from criminey-sakes! What the hell is that? I mean if she had told me she didn’t like seeing me wandering drowsily to and from the toilet in the middle of the night dressed only in my dirty old gich; OR if she had told me that the rotting half a roast of lamb left over from a wonderful Easter dinner with my folks she found in the vegetable crisper in the fridge had bothered her; OR if she had been offended by some offhanded political comments I may have made while she was ranting on in her oh so smug left-leaning never-ending commentary about her oh so interesting life in this oh so dreary town… I might have determined to try to rectify the situation; plead my case and tried to stay on. As it played out, she told me of my vibe problems; I responded simply “OK” and went about my normal business. I have decided that her “6 weeks of knowing me” critique of my vibe was about as meaningful an opinion on my “vibe” as say the opinions expressed by the cab driver who drove me home from one of any number of bars I frequented last month. I remain confident that my vibe is just fine but, perhaps over prudently, I will keep my mind open to the concept that perhaps my vibe could use a bit of fine-tuning.

Although I have played out a number of scenarios, I will not seek revenge for this attack on my vibe; I will not call the City of Toronto’s Tenants Association to inquire on the validity of “vibe related” evictions; I will not seek out the services of the City of Toronto’s building department to report an un-permitted renovation to her bathroom; nor will I flip her a finger and make some reference to the fact that she’s just an old dried out bitch-hag who has sunken too deeply into this self-delusional idea that this house of hers is some kind of “international creative person’s oasis in the sea of an uncaring corporate driven city of un-feeling doom”… I will settle on the best revenge being my continuing to live vibrantly.

So, I move out of the Baden Street room and into the small town of Brockville Ontario. The small town of Brockville has become my family’s un-official hometown. I was not raised there, but my Aunt Sue the official Matriarch of my family raised her seven children there, we visited often. Also after an almost 36 year tradition of Thanksgiving dinners in the great old house by the river… Being in Brockville always feels like a homecoming. The fact that it’s on the St. Lawrence River… I will not get into that here.

My last visit to the small town of Brockville was two weekends ago. Upon that visit I was reminded that my cousin Doug who sails with his brother, my cousin John had secured his own boat for the racing season and would no longer be sailing with my cousin John. An opening; at the time it was wishful thinking that I could fill it. After all traveling from Toronto to Brockville every Tuesday and Thursday and most weekends would not only be time consuming, but also cost me $188 return each time I did it. My bad vibe to the rescue! It would seem after this eviction, I could not come up with one single reason to continue to live in the City of Toronto. Yo, bitch Land Lady, thanks for the invitation to spend a few weeks sailing with my cousin John.

I’m pretty pumped about this move to a small town. I grew up in a small town, and it’s been a while since I spent more than a weekend in a small town. Perhaps it will help in our future plans to live in an even smaller town. We’ll see what comes of it.

Right now; I’m gathering up my gear here. I’ll see if this experience generates anything remotely interesting enough to post here. At the very least, I will post our race results each Tuesday and Thursday and the occasional weekend we do the regattas.

Ahh, the heady days of ecstasy fueled DJ dance parties, ecstasy fueled Friday friendly get togethers, ecstasy fueled Wednesday walk abouts… ecstasy. So much freakin’ ecstasy; I seldom found the chance to be happy. Oh, those indeed were the heady days of living at Clinton and Gore.

I have found myself walking past Clinton and Gore quite often these last few weeks. Not so much in an attempt to wander down memory’s lanes; rather because it’s the shortest way home from the Dip. A reminder, that I am using the word “home” loosely these days; as home has become less a place than a mission these days.

My apartment at Clinton and Gore was a comfy place; two bedrooms, one of which became my Lego room when I was toying with the idea that I would entertain my mind by playing with Lego again. Did I mention, I was doing a lot of ecstasy. The Lego was eventually handed off to my cousin’s son and the apartment at Clinton and Gore was handed off to Carl.

That worked.

The apartment at Clinton and Gore was a small bit of punctuation I guess. It was from the apartment at Clinton and Gore that I ended my company and ended what I guess would be my first time in the city of Toronto. I left the apartment at Clinton and Gore to fly off on a disastrous adventure in Central America. Since then it has often felt as if I am always “Leaving the city of Toronto”.

I’ve actually been leaving the city of Toronto since I arrived here a way back in 1980. Of course back then the concrete was mostly freshly poured and to a set of young and excitable eyes, heavily wanting to be involved in the punk scene that was later found out to be long dead before I ever really got involved; I guess it felt like I was arriving…
Ah, the heady days of caffeine fueled angst ridden donut shop conversations that raged into the wee hours… beer fueled boppings at the Beverly when money was about… evening walks that sent me spinning through every last single one of these streets in the city of Toronto. As was the case with most of my young pals at the time, I had moved from somewhere smaller and was wowed big the bigness of this place.

Funny how small a big place gets with each year that passes. Funny how the walls start closing in after you’ve done every possible thing you could possibly imagine doing in the big place. Funny how you have to eject every last single item you’ve built for and around yourself before you can finally fulfill that pounding desire to leave the big place; funny how time after time after time again upon returning to that big place you can convince yourself that you’re NOT really there; it’s a mirage, a temporary landing zone, a place from which you will bounce onto the next place. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself over and over and over again.

I should note, that I really didn’t leave the city of Toronto for NYC in search of a bigger place. I was quite happy to find little places in that big place that I could call home. OK, it was nice that there were a lot of these little places all piled in and around each other, and it was nice to walk from one place to the other, but it wasn’t the bigness of NYC that attracted me, it was just some place different. And, yes, I do miss the place.

So here I sit, waiting to bounce. I would seem that, considering the velocity at which I hit the city of Toronto this time round, it should be one very big bounce. Unfortunately at this particular moment in time I’m still kind of trapped in one of those ultra slow motion motion pictures showing the awesome compression and deformation of certain objects as they impact upon larger motionless objects; big hard cold objects; objects with no sense or feeling; objects that lack the ability to even recognize the fact that they are indeed being struck by an object traveling at extremely volatile velocities. Awesome compression and deformation indeed.

I have become more and more tired in all this waiting. Of course at lot of this was beyond my control as the pages of the calendar had to slowly turn; as I stared at the clock on the wall and watched every single second click past over the minute into the hour beyond the days and onto the months. Tired of constantly reminding myself that I am NOT here in the city of Toronto, that I am simply bouncing on through. Quite tired of each and every foot fall landing squarely within a chunk of land clearer demarcated as indeed a small, approximately four inch by twelve inch portion of land within’ the boundaries of the city of Toronto…

I’m expecting I’ll be walking on up to the Dip later today. I’m assuming I’ll walk on past the corner of Clinton and Gore. I’ll probably watch where I’m walking while looking at all the things I no longer see. I assume my mind will wander here and there and dig up the odd old memory… Memories of the days of concrete… perhaps. I expect, today I might pause a bit at Clinton and College; perhaps if I do pause, this pause may represent that frame in the film that marks the end of the awesome compression and deformation and the beginning of the awesome expansion and the natural, returning to normal. Perhaps if I just let myself be a bit more here, a bit more happily here, even just for a small moment, a quick pause; perhaps this pause will hasten this next departure. We’ll see what happens later today, and just exactly what is to be found, when I pause at the corner of Clinton and Gore.

So it would appear as I have been suffering some form of mental laryngitis these past few months. Perhaps, or perhaps I’ve been suffering through yet another debilitating round of self-absorbed… Lost in my own head. Hit the eject button NOW or forever loose myself… I’m definitely not going to start this back up again to bore myself with tired old tirades on this so called predicament. I here, so there, move on.

Have you ever wished you could go back in time; knowing all you know… blah blah blah. Of course you have! Actually, I’d be willing to bet it’s a common theme in of those 15 minute out of every half hour that your mind wanders down the corridor, out the door and into that place we go when we’re just so bored of work we can’t bloody well take it anymore.

Careful what you wish for!

Back in time is where I am now. Thrown back onto the streets I got tired of looking at years and years ago… Back to Yonge Street, back to Parkdale, back to Little Italy… flat on my back. What to make of this; all I can say really is, FUCK I am glad winter is over and done with.

Let springs dreams turn into plans, and plans into action. As I ramble on into this first shot, I’ll let my mind wander about a bit. It really was all just a bunch of rambling moments anyhow. Rambling jumbled thoughts squirted out into words that we rolled around until they balled up into some vaguely coherent pitter patter. On occasion, this pitter patter had a nice ring to it… a tempo.

Perhaps starting with the staccato herks and jerks of poorly played improvisational jazz beats… nope, just a monkey pecking at the keys… desperately searching for the one that used to trigger the banana door… Perhaps I’m just trying to teach these fingers to tap dance again. Perhaps I’m trying to hard.

Careful what you wish for indeed!

I’m not finished yet. Not finished in the least. We have a long way to go and a huge pile of unfinished dreams to conquer. There are roads and paths we’ve never even imagined we’d walk down, AND there are places we’ve yet to rest our heads upon. I’m NOT finished yet! I have embarrassed myself; I’ve stood on my hands and spoken through the crack in my ass… I’ve walked backwards and bumped into folks whose names I have long ago forgotten and I have woken up in the ditch with my pants on backwards; but I am not finished yet.

Here we go again… another fine mess to be sorted, picked over and placed on these pages. To long a break… There are things needing to be said, projects to complete… Here we go again. You haven’t heard the last of me.

Unfortunately I wont be there to watch… Wont be there to watch four new Mark Bars open each summer. Wont be there to watch coffee prices rise and people laughing about it. I wont be there as one by one the cheaper apartments are vacated by long local families, painted and rented at twice the price. I wont be there to see Elvis for the last time; or watch Frankie’s mom get hosed. I wont be there to see Helen and Tommy, slowly and painfully squeezed out of the one last remaining local; Tommy’s fault perhaps, but Helen’s tanacity will only allow for a whithering, rather than a conversion…I hear they’re closing the “Crack Hotel”. I hear that they’ll be booting out Patrick, Elvis and Fozzie… I hear that Greenpoint is becoming another moment in time, a moment in time us vagabonds have seen over and over and over again. Where is Parkdale; Queen Street; The West and East Villages… Where is Williamsburg and Dumbo… Bedstuy, Harlem and the South Bronx on the verge… Where is the Northeastern inner city; where is North America?

I hear that rents are cheap and the sunsets are lovely. I hear that the people are warm and friendly; and that they are eager to build their country. I hear that the jungle remains untouched, and that you can drink from every stream up stream of the last toilet on the hill. We’ll hear the blast of the steam whistle on this weeks arriving cruise ship… and we’ll hope we’ll be there at least ten years before the all-inclusive starbucks jungle island eco-resort lays waste another mini-paradise.

You know, in Holland the toilets have these odd little shelves that sit above the main pool, just above the drain. The shelf is cup shaped and holds just enough water to barely cover ones droppings; i guess to keep the stink down. I was told that this shelf allowed the good people of the Netherlands to, well, examine their poops. I guess, they dig around looking for that lucky peanut… counting the number of undigested kernels from last nights corn chowder…

I once had it in mind to take a look at my poops… living in the “land of toilet shelves” for a time; the urge to do so becomes overwhelming. Finally, one morning, after a quite satisfying movement; I wiped up, zipped up and swung around to, you know… to have a good look. Funny thing… all I saw was shit.

I flushed, woosh off the shelf it went… and I went on with my day.

I don’t really give a shit about my poop anymore.