Three dimensions

[vaneramos]

It has been about three years, but this morning the bathroom floor tiles are crawling with white maggots. I'm fighting a migraine. Along with the panic thing, this seems to herald an early arrival of SAD. Gotta get outside every day.

Yesterday I was. All over the city we were outside and walking, walking, walking. It happened with one group: roosterbear, quillon, schillerium and rfmcpdei. We were trying to meet up for dinner with the other group: mickeytor. After walking from the Village down Church Street to Queen Street and all the way past Trinity-Bellwood Park to find Fresh, a vegetarian restaurant, we discovered we had passed the other location near Queen and Spadina.

Walking, walking, more walking. A street car. A taxi cab. Phone calls to mickeytor's roommate. More phone calls. We had set out to meet him at 5:00. Finally at 7:45 the six of us sat down to dinner, not at Fresh, but in a restaurant in Chinatown. I was ravenous.

I could only laugh. Apart from that it was an excellent day. roosterbear (Darren) and quillon (Steve) are really solid guys. rfmcdpei is a total sweetie, and funny! And it was fun meeting Sue Ellen and becoming part of mickeytor's lj gallery. At the end, hugging Darren in front of the Selby hotel I felt a quiver of tears deep inside, but they didn't rise. He's the sort of person I could spend days with.

The strangest image from the whole day happened while I was sitting on the subway, hurrying to meet Darren and Steve for brunch. A guy stepped across the platform with a lizard hanging from the nape of his neck. A live lizard. It was clinging to the back collar of his t-shirt like an inert monkey, hind legs dangling.

All these thoughts and images go streaming past. It made me want to carry a notebook so I would remember all the impressions to share with you. There is so much beauty in a day. And yesterday lots of love, too, the kind that comes from knowing people intimately from their writing and suddenly knowing them so much better, getting a real feeling not just for who they are, but how. It's like a picture suddenly springing into three dimensions.

I felt like I should be writing down phrases on the subway, sitting at Timothy's, watching the sun set along Queen Street. Catching the strange evening light across the wall of The Bay, or on the fountain in front of City Hall. Maybe there would be nothing wrong with pulling out my handwritten journal at any moment, to catch the words streaming through my head, but something smaller would be more discrete, something to fit in my pocket. And a pen.

I see them sometimes: poets sitting on the TTC, scrawling lines while the darkness flickers by. I want to go into that writing obsession with all my self.

Even ruralrob made a cameo appearance at Timothy's to greet us all. Cutting a figure that has become as familiar now as Alfred Hitchcock, only different.

After dinner I tried bubble tea for the first time, lychee flavour. It made the tapioca blobs taste like tiny, squishy lychee fruits. And rfmcdpei told me about a gallery on the ninth floor of The Bay. It has Emily Carr paintings. I want to see.




At City Hall, from left: rfmcdpei, roosterbear, schillerium, quillon