The Grumpy Owl

Thank you Toronto Transit Commission.

There’s few things I enjoy more than basking in the warm glow of ambient hatred. I don’t know how you did it but you’ve now managed to create an utterly adversarial relationship between yourself and the people of Toronto.

(I know exactly how you did it to me.)

Even though your last four fare hikes (aka tax on poor workers)  were insane, it looks like you’ve finally dropped the fateful straw on the camel’s back.  And the people of Toronto, normally so compliant, have finally turned on you.  They’re snapping pictures while you sleep and you blame them for not waking you up.  They’re filming your extended breaks and you’re yelling at people with cameras.

Good for you TTC!

I had given up all hope that the people of Toronto would ever resist anything.  You’ve restored my faith in them.

And please go on strike.  That would be the perfectly wrong thing to do.  I expect no less.

Toronto has recently been panicked by a mathematical anomaly.  In the month of January, fourteen pedestrians in the GTA  (seven in Toronto) were killed by cars.   Proving that the state will always do the exact wrong thing, the police have now cracked down on jaywalking.

I spend a lot of time walking in this city of ours and I’ve almost been hit by cars plenty of times.  It’s not because I jaywalk.  I very rarely do.  Jaywalking is a lot like nose-picking.  You should do it when it’s worse not to.  I’ll jaywalk when its the safer option or when the roads are abandoned.

I don’t do it out of convenience or rushing.

And, just like nose-picking, jaywalking has some health benefits.  Especially when you live near an intersection as dangerous and accident-prone as mine.

Although I dislike jaywalking, I’m not some big booster of traffic lights.  They should be abolished.  It’s dangerous and moronic to put your faith in some machine that other people are supposed to obey.  Red lights are being run all the time.  (I saw it twice yesterday and once today, while out doing my laundry.)  And you only need to be hit once.

I’m a big booster of looking both ways before I cross.

Because you have to fucking aware out there.  It’s not good enough to replace your judgement with a series of flashing lights like some sort of lab rat in a cheese dispensing test.  You have to look both ways.  And if you see a cop, it’s best not to jaywalk.  Unless you can handle the sanctimonious speech and ticket.

I can’t.

Because not only are they giving tickets, they’re also delivering lectures like a bunch of god-damn street corner Christians.   And adults are just standing there, listening to this? What are we?  Misbehaving children?  Our society is pretty fucked up when this terror of the police is normal.

There’s no need to police jaywalking.  There’s not even a need for a jaywalking law.  Jaywalking polices itself and it’s governed by two laws:  Those of physics and that of natural selection.  If a person can’t take one of those into account, they’ll quickly obey the other.  And the sort of person who can ignore physics and/or self preservation is unlikely to be impressed by fifty dollar tickets.

As that old Christian Anarchist,  Ammon Hennacy, once said: “Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don’t need them and the bad people don’t follow them, so what good are they?”  They’re no fucking good at all.

pic nicked from here

pic nicked from here.

A cat was trapped at The Humane Society then no one checked the trap.  So the cat died.  Its mummified remains were discovered the other day.

That happened to me once with a mouse and a live trap.  I set the thing then forgot all about it.  But that mouse made a lot of noise.  Every night I would wonder where that noise was coming from.  Then the noise stopped.

A while later, I found the trap, opened it, and there was a little mouse mummy.  It really stank.  I gagged.

Scotiabank hardly knows how to bank.  It should come as no surprise that they can’t throw an artshow.

I tried to attend this year’s Nuit Blanche.  I put on a black suit, towed along my infernal device and a couple of infernal friends, thinking that there might be something to do or, at least, something to take pics of and tweet about.  Thus armed, I strolled about the town.  Even with a map, I couldn’t find Nuit Blanche.  All I saw was Queen Street looking like a bad memory of an all-ages, Much Music sponsored  rave party.

True, there were more people than normal on Queen Street; each one of them looking for something that wasn’t there, creating something that, sadly, was, and I did see some videos of hockey fights with an awful jazz band at MOCA and some sort of giant litebright in the park, but that was all.  That’s what the banks call art.

The rest of this celebrated night of art?  Where the fuck was it?

Was it in the galleries?  The same galleries that are open the other 364 days of the year.  Perhaps it was in the shoe stores or the parties at the hair salons? Wherever it was, it was somewhere I was not.  Next year, I plan on being at home playing video games.  This so called festival is complete waste of time.  I’d rather tickle my cat.

Nuit Blanche is nothing but a bunch of drunken window shopping.  You can do that any night.  You can do that without a government grant.  This is just Toronto’s typical excuse for culture.  Publicly funded corporate advertisements attended by howling mobs of morons.    Everyone pretending that there’s something to do other than shop and something to talk about other than why our money is being spent on this bullshit.

Why are we paying to destroy any genuine culture and replace it with these monstrosities?

It’s just glittery bullshit.  And this year it didn’t even glitter.

Parkrotica on Vimeo on Vimeo

via Parkrotica on Vimeo.

Parkrotica from Ryan Oakley on Vimeo.

This city is as humid and reeking as a hooker’s quiff.   And I could certainly do without ever being asked again:  “Aren’t you hot in that?” Obviously I am.  Everyone is hot.  Even naked, they are hot.  You know why?  Because the weather is hot.  That’s why.  And I can’t take the weather off any better than you can.

I could better tolerate this question if the people asking it were not drenched in sweat and panting like rabid dogs.  If they were speaking from some position of cool luxury, perhaps radiating a slight chill while dabbing the frost from their eyebrows, I would feel some pressure to ape their approach to summer heat. But they’re not.

They’re just whining.

I seriously doubt that I feel any hotter than they look.  Once,  last summer, I abandoned my better judgement and started believing that all these people were on to something.  I took a day and dressed like them, in heavy t-shirt fabrics and all that.  But I detected no improvement.  It remained hot.  The only difference was that I became visibly sweaty.  And I felt the sun beating on my pale, delicate skin.  It was awful.

So yes:  I am hot in this just like you are hot in that.

Attend to yourself and leave me out of it.

When it’s hot, one my favourite things to do is take a walk in High Park.  A long walk.  Preferably around its entire circumference.   I do this  with myself or, if I feel like listening to some complaining, with a pretty girl. The park is nice and hilly.   There is abundant shade, ample greenery and, in the better parts, a lack of humans.  One can watch overheated animals laying in the shade and take solace from their suffering.

I almost asked this bufflao if he was hot in that.

Something in his eye disuaded me.

Shalome was, as always, good company.  She even brought her camera.  This gave her something to do while I played with mine.  And she took some nice shots of animals and the like. You can look at her photos from the day here.

I’ll include some for your perusal and, the next post is the video I made.  But you probably already know that.

YouTube – Smurfy Brown does Michael Jackson.

Vid by The Chairman

Many of my fellow Torontonians may have seen this fellow.  He’s been a fixture on Queen West for years.  What the casual observer may not know is that he has a thousand and one names and, if you recite them, he will appear in a puff of crack smoke.   He will only vanish after you throw him out.

(Just off the top of my head, he’s known as The Alley Gnome, The Gnome, Get-Out, Stevie, Smurfy Brown and Osama Bum Laden.  To me, he’s the Alley Gnome or The Gnome.  Most of these names were based on a giant hat that he wore for years before suddenly switching his style up.)

Though I doubt passer-bys think much of him, those who live or work on Queen West spend a great amount of time thinking about him. He’s a rugged lil’ fuck who spends all his time outdoors.  He’s not your friend and, should you see the staff at your local bistro ejecting him, you should know that there is a good reason for it.  He’s earned every ban he’s ever got.  Don’t come to his defence.  You know nothing.

He’s crazier than Michael Jackson.  Well, maybe.

pic nicked from here

Our mayor, our unions and our whole government is a fraud.

It’s a simple system:  The people pay taxes to the government.   The government provides services.  This is a basic social contract.   And yet something has gone drastically wrong.

Man was born in a clean room but is now everywhere in filth.

The people have held up their end of the bargain.  They have no choice.  Should they refuse to pay taxes, they get in trouble with the law.  But the government is no longer providing the services that they’re paid for.  When it comes to them and their fraud, the law is nowhere to be found.  It’s vanished as fast a gangster hitting the mattresses.

Toronto is a month deep into a city strike that includes paramedics, swimming pools and, most importantly, garbage.

The same city council that, just a few months ago, banned smoking within nine meters of a children’s playground is now dumping its garbage in parks.  Then spraying that garbage with poison.  The same city council that thinks having an open bottle of wine during your picnic is a threat to health and public order is now turning those parks into dumps.  Then spraying those dumps with poison.  We are governed by a cabal of sanctimonious cunts.

Their sanctimony is only exceeded by their incompetence.

A government that finds itself unable to perform its most basic functions has no business trying to perform any other function.  It’s like an aspiring gymnast trying to learn a triple backflip on the highbeam without mastering the sommersault.  A bartender trying to be like Tom Cruise in cocktail without being able to pull a pint.  It’s ridculous and it’s a drain on time and effort better spent on the possible.   None of which would be so bad if we weren’t paying for it.

But we are.

Not only in taxes but in business.  Toronto has been a service economy for as long as I can remember.  The mayor and the unions have managed to do what the collapse of American banking could not.  They’ve set off a recession in Toronto.  This strike has cost every restaurant money in pick-up and lost tourism.  It’s plain spooked the bridge and tunnel crowd.  It’s kicked Toronto’s economy in the nuts.  Through taxes, they charge us for the privilege.

And they still have the nerve to tell us what to do?

pic nicked from here

When exactly did our government turn into some saran-wrap clad dominatrix?  When exactly did the people become some cowering, bound creature on a dirty mattress, begging to be hit harder and told what a naughty boy they are?  It probably happened about the same time the notion of a “sin tax” took hold.

The unions are little better.  This whole thing seems to be about bankable sick days.  That is, the union wants to get paid for days they were sick.  They also want to be able to collect these days and cash them in.  It’s a ridiculous issue.  And the unions have completely failed to tie this into any other social concern that might motivate the public to support them.  From where I’m standing, union people making more money just drives up prices.   It hurts me.

(I heard the first reasonable explanation of all this yesterday.  ((From a labour lawyer via The Chairman.))  Apparently it has to do with the firemen and the cops and arbitration.  An arbitration process is based on pretending it’s a real world scenario.  They base it on the last strike.  If the garbage men give up their bankable sick days, the cops and firemen, who are not allowed to strike, will likely lose theirs during their next arbitration.  The municipality is striking on behalf of the people who cannot.  So that cops and firemen can get a better deal.  One wonders if the unions have told their members this.   One wonders why no one has informed the public.)

pic nicked from here

We’re in the middle of a systems collapse in Toronto.  A society that can’t even pick up after itself is not really a society.   Every level of organization has failed and is charging for the failure.  The city is unable to perform its basic functions.   Our mayor is a complete prat, the unions are up to God knows what and the people are, as usual, docile.  All are in conflict with each other about bullshit and it all has to be this way.  This is clusterfuck.

Cascading clusterfuck.

And you best get used to it.  The future has more in store.

YouTube – Toronto Garbage Strike. Week Three. July 2009.

This is Toronto.  I’m not sure what’s worse:  The garbage or the hippies dancing in the park.

Toronto’s Transit Commission plans to ban smoking within ten meters of bus stops. I was not even aware that the TTC owned the side-walks, air and private property around these stops.  They certainly do nothing to maintain their property.

Furthermore, I’ve never seen any TTC security patrolling the side-walks.  Ever.  In my whole life.  Not one, not once.  I’d assumed that was beyond their mandate.

If I may be so bold, I’d like to remind the cabal of lunatics who run this city that banning smoking on side-walks is beyond the duties of the TTC.  Their job is to deliver affordable and timely transit to the working classes, not to pass laws about how those classes entertain themselves before they enter the bus or what they do after they leave it.  Simply put, it is none of their fucking business.

And yet, there they are, criminalizing the workers and the time honoured tradition of a quick cigarette before the bus.  Our overeducated mayor is certainly starting to look like an elitist; one who must truly hate the working classes to ban such simple leisure.  What’s next?  A TTC ban on the after work beer?

Why is it that the organizations who are the quickest to expand their duties are always such abysmal failures at the ones they already possess?

Music by Les Baxter and Bas Sheva

Video by Ryan Oakley

Length 2 minutes thirty seconds

February 17, 2009. A Tuesday Evening. A date which will live in infamy

In a disaster that some are already calling Toronto’s second September 11, the neighbourhood coin laundry on Queen West, filled up with smoke.

Fire-fighters braved the raging inferno and turned on a fan while horrified patrons watched, helpless, from the side-walk. Their clothes would not be cleaned tonight. Perhaps, not ever. Nor will their quarters be returned. It is estimated that tonight’s tragedy cost the local economy as much as eighteen dollars and the city much more.

One witness recalled last year when Queen West had its first September 11. Also in February. That catastrophe burned down a few shops. No one was hurt.We can only pray that no one was hurt tonight and everyone will, someday, get their laundry done.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.785060&w=425&h=350&fv=clip_id%3D3266754%26server%3Dvimeo.com%26autoplay%3D0%26fullscreen%3D1%26md5%3D0%26show_portrait%3D0%26show_title%3D0%26show_byline%3D0%26context%3D%7Cnewest%26context_id%3D%26force_embed%3D0%26multimoog%3D%26color%3D00ADEF]

Tags: Uncategorized

A couple of days ago, over 100,000 people were left without power in Toronto during the coldest weather the winter has yet offered us.

Though suffering from a recent shoulder injury and drugged out of my mind on muscle relaxants and painkillers, I was fairly well prepared, being in possession of a headlamp, an emergency supply of candles, two Cohiba cigars fresh from Cuba, an insulated coffee pot, nightcap, warm slippers and a girl with an iPhone.  Using these simple devices, I was able to stay warm, lit and informed. If I had some sort of bar-be-que, I would have been enjoying utterly sinful Amish luxury.

When the power first went out, I filled the bathtub with cold water.  Though I can remember the days when an outage in Toronto lasted about twenty minutes, those days were over five years ago.  These days, you just never know.  I prepare for the worst, hope for the best and expect something in between the two.

The power was out in some parts of town for about twenty four hours.  As for me, it was returned in about ten.  It’s quite a long time when the temperatures are twenty below and the heat is electric.  But it could of been worse than the chilly, candlelit romance of the primitive.

One day, it probably will be.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been basically without internet.  The outage managed to destroy my modem, thus thrusting me into the wonderful world of Bell Customer Service.  I attempted to leech off the next door store’s meagre connection –bad, I know– and awaited a repairman for a while, only to discover that he had arrived two hours early and left a note without speaking to anyone or doing anything.  He did leave an illegible phone number.

I called Bell, spoke to their robot Emily, was shunted around for an hour and finally had a rather spirited conversation with a company representative in India.  She informed me, in no uncertain terms, that he might be back today.

And he actually did make it.  Turns out the blackout left our modem alone but fried some of our outside gear.  He managed to repair this and, viola, I’m back to the modern world.  That is watching 90210 DVDs, cooking Tacos and blogging.  My shoulder even feels better.  But I do miss the medication.

Tags: Uncategorized

A friend of mine put this video together. He’s a fairly private person so I’m not going to give away his name but, safe to say, he has one of the most finely tuned bullshit detectors I’ve ever come across.  He’s funny too.  Watch the video.

[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=QQlJqGAR9qM]

Toronto has certain sacred cows. Before I was born, it was “Toronto the Good.” I have no idea what that is. When I moved here, it was a “world class city.” I’m not sure what that’s supposed to be. Now we’re obsessed with “diversity.” Whatever that means.

But, if you’re from out of town, you should be prepared for a speech about how we’re the most multicultural city on the planet. I don’t know where this one got started. I first read it on a bottlecap of “Toronto’s Own.” (This was an awful beer that was manufactured by the city.) And I don’t believe everything I read on beer.

Apparently, other people lack my intellectual rigor.

Canadians will believe anything about being Canadian as long as it makes them feel good about the condition. They will also disbelieve anything that makes them feel bad.

All in all, they’re a pompous and obnoxious group.

An American friend of mine was once hit upon by a “Canook” as she calls them. The snowback had a girlfriend but she was busy making out with some other fellow. After failing to escape from this free spirit, she asked if he was bothered by a barfly groping his lady.

“Oh no,” he said. “We’re very liberal in Canada.”

I have nothing against swingers –except that they’re fatter than Satanists– but it’s silly to act like your sexual whims are shared by a whole nation. This fellow hasn’t even met most of Canada and yet, here he is, lecturing a foreigner on our sexual habits.

I am incredibly tempted to say that his attitude is typical but that would be the same form of bullshit. Still, incredibly tempted . . .

But a single person, no matter how goofy, cannot be held up as an example of a massive group of people. That fellow is no more like an average Canook than me. He’s not my spokesman and I’m not his. But he is suffering from a common delusion. That he speaks on my behalf because of an accident of birth.

Culture is often an excuse for bad behavior. (I’m a bit of an authority on that, being half Irish.) When it’s not an excuse or providing us with some of our best jokes, it’s just what people do because they were taught it and kept doing because they like it. Culture is a mostly-harmless disease that we transmit through generations.

Culture is herpes. And, for some people, vice versa.

Just like I’m against herpes though strongly pro-syphilis, I’m strongly in favor of diversity between individuals but not between cultures. The logic simply doesn’t add up.

Once you decide that a person is primarily defined by their culture, you can’t just decree that all cultures are equal. Whether or not they’re allowed to, people will build a little hierarchy. They’ll judge other people based upon their culture. They will find some superior and some inferior. They will judge whole groups of individuals based upon the accidents of economics and geography that create these so-called cultures.

And you know what that is? That’s racism, stupid.

Multiculturalism as government policy is racism.

It’s also a pandering, condescending demagoguery. “Congratulations on your race. You must be very proud. Tell me, how did you get such a good culture and where can I get some?”

People love being rewarded for things they had nothing to do with. (God knows, I’m still waiting for my noble prize for the discovery of genetics. I feel that, as a white man, I did that.) But they never want to be blamed even for what they did do, let alone what they didn’t. (Slavery was someone else’s relatives, I swear!)

If you have it one way, you’re going to get it both ways. Up both holes.

I don’t know about how you live your life but I certainly don’t need that. I don’t need to piggyback on anyone else’s accomplishments. I have enough of my own. I also don’t need their problems. Same reason.

Now if someone wants to keep cooking the food their parents taught them to cook, that’s very well and good. If they want to speak the language of their ancestors, it’s none of my concern. If they want to write their signs for the restaurant where they sell that food in that language, I could care less. They can write it in gibberish for all I care. The market will decide whether it sells.

If they want to do that, it’s none of my business. If they don’t, it’s still none of business. And if it’s not my business, it’s certainly not the business of the state. Who are they anyway?

Furthermore, it’s a bit unseemly to watch politicians latch onto the hard work of immigrants for propaganda purposes. Frankly, it’s gross. Instead of patting the head of the Sri-Lankan in dishpit for having a culture, how about you reduce his hydro bill? Just sayin’, money talks. We all know what bullshit does.

People aren’t their cultures. They’re not even people. They’re just whoever they are.

Is Toronto a diverse city? Of course. Millions of people live here. And that gets a bit complicated. But, as confused as we may sometimes be by all the moving meat, we should resist the urge to start organizing each other according to race. After all, we’re all being sold the same bullshit by the same people.

And we should all stop buying it.

Shirt design from Ideall Clothing

A couple of minor celebrities have insulted Toronto. Some people have freaked out and a major paper has gone into tantrum mode. It’ll spend the summer reassuring its readers that this is the greatest city on on Earth. They want people to talk about where to get a good bagel.

Well, I won’t be doing that. Fuck this city. Toronto don’t love me and I don’t love it.

But don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in Canada.

Just the other night, after work, I was chatting with a friend about this city. He grew up here; I moved here 12 years ago. We think along the same lines. It’s a big city and it doesn’t give a shit about anyone in it. Some people can’t handle that. They can’t survive. Toronto is a fucking meat grinder. We’re the meat.

If you’ve lived any sort of life here at all, you’ve probably seen the same story played out. Someone moves to Toronto from a small town and this city just fucking eats them. They’ll be a decent person. It doesn’t matter. They wind up strung out, fucked up and under a bridge. They can’t handle the options.

Either they go home, go to jail or they die. They break.

It happens all the time. No one stops them and no one helps them.

Because no one gives a shit. This city is not waiting for you.

It’ll hit you in the head, take your money and step over you on the way to where it’s going. So you better be going somewhere too and you better get there fast. Keep your eyes straight ahead, keep pace and be aware. Beware. Get slow and you’re trampled. Get distracted and you’re dead. Ignore whats around you and something will jump out and grab you.

People love to talk about how safe Toronto is. Or how how dangerous. Really, it’s like anywhere. It’s safe until it’s not. Use your head.

In a city of this size, you’re just a wallet with a problem attached. No one gives a shit about the problem. We all have them. Some people can’t stand this. They get lonely and say the city is cold or it’s stuck up. Really, it’s neither. It’s not that hard to make friends here. But you better keep your eyes open. The people that you just party with, they don’t care about you. Not really. They care about a good time.

Become dead weight here and you’re dead to everyone. No one has the money or the time to dragged down by your shit. Everyone is trying to not be dragged down by theirs. The city is a potluck and everyone brings something. Make sure you bring something good. Or don’t bother coming.

And just like anywhere, the best way to have friends is to be a friend. You need some interests to be interesting. Figure out what you want to do and do it. The city is not waiting and it doesn’t care about you. Not even a little bit. The only thing you’ll get here is what you make or take out of it.

As my friend said, he’s met people in this city that he never would have met anywhere else. Seen things that he never would have seen anywhere else. That’s Toronto. He had a gun put in his face. That’s Toronto too. If you love it, you’re crazy. But you have to be crazy to live here.

The Toronto Transit workers are the paper anus of a pancake. They rend upwards to noodle . . .

Sorry, I think my Salvador Dali cufflinks are getting to me.

The appropriate reaction to the TTC strike is more along these lines: OH MY GOD!!! HELP ME!!! WHAT WILL I DO?!

Well, I’ll do what I usually do: Walk.

And I’ll do it for the same reasons that I started doing it. I hate the TTC. I hate the TTC “workers.” I hate the TTC passengers. And I hate the stupid fucking streetcars. Toronto has based its transit system on some idea of quaint. That is nothing to base a transit system on. Not in the twenty first century.

People will tell you that it’s wrong to hate. Not me. I say love your hate.

My hate has profited me. Not only is it one of the primary reasons for the walking stick but, last year, the money I saved by walking to and from work– in snow, sun and miscellaneous, often weaving my way through drunken louts and occasionally being engaged by them– paid for a good portion of my bespoke suit.

It’s the suit that hate bought.  And hate looks great.

The journey is about six kilometers one way but it only takes a half hour longer to walk it than it does to take the street car. I enjoy my walks. I have never enjoyed a streetcar ride.

Just today, on Queen West, I saw a little boy grabbing the hand of a mannequin in motorcycle clothes. To his mother he kept saying: “That’s Daddy! That’s my Daddy!” Embarrassed, his mother tried to tell him that this plastic biker was not his father and tried to drag him away. He had a fit.

You just don’t see things like that on the TTC.

So, before you panic, let me do you a favor and introduce you to your legs. The TTC is making you fat, lazy, stupid and miserable. Just like it did to their employees.

Fuck them all. I hope they all wake up jobless.

pic nicked from here