west uptowner

catface bee graffiti, originally uploaded by trevorsc.

Saw some applique graffiti yesterday, and some funky arty stuff too. Every summer the best graffiti alley in Toronto undergoes a bit of a transformation.

Meetings and theatre stuff continue apace. Have to do 100 things this week before flying to E-burgh, and even the rainy days here are smog days -- there seems to be no relief this year from dense, heavy air thick with ... gross unmentionables. It's not as stinky as pollution in other cities -- in Bogota you know you're getting your smog pretty much direct from the tailpipe. But the humidity in Toronto turns the air into a diffuse, weighty pillow of gases pressed down over your face. You feel it as a pain in the lungs, a few minutes after you lock your bike and dive into an air-conditioned building.

Had a creepy bike ride on the way home, last night. Half the downtown core was in a blackout for most of the day, but as I was cruising home around 10pm it seemed like power had been restored – I usually travel east along Queen st, and all the lights were working business as usual. But a few of the north-south streets were still powerless. Parliament street was a deep lightless cave tunneling up into the night like a rural highway.

Invented today:

A flag with which to claim sovereignty over a few spare hours of time.

A coo to calm a computer that doesn't want to cooperate with you.

A thought in a foreign language that is more reassuring than any thought in your own.

A way of rubbing your temples so that unpleasant things stop being visible to you.

# posted by trev @ 9:39 a.m.