Taxi, bus, car, 500 km from Ottawa to Toronto.

John, com­ing from a week­end wed­ding, took a flight from Thunder Bay to pick me up. We spent the first three days at the house of John’s par­ents. Circumstances like these always put me on edge; with adults around, we tend to behave, and I’m gen­er­ally obnox­ious when I’m with John.

The step-mother rules the house with an iron fist. No noise after ten. No noise before seven. No using the guest tow­els or soap.

One morn­ing, I was hav­ing toast with some mar­malade when I real­ized that the orange, unla­beled spread in the back of the fridge had a rather sharp taste, sig­ni­fy­ing that it was either offal or expired. John stopped me as I opened the kitchen garbage bin.

“You can’t throw that out”

“Why not?”

“It’s food. Food smells.” John pointed to the dish dry­ing rack. It was filled with milk bags which were used, emp­tied, washed, and dried before being thrown out.

“What am I sup­posed to do with it?”

“We’ll throw it in the back yard for the birds”

“What if the birds won’t eat it? A piece of toast cov­ered with mar­malade would be harder to explain than food in the garbage.”

Eventually, we put the toast in a Zip-Loc bag and dis­posed of it in a pub­lic trash bin four blocks away from the house.

Thumbnail: Flower 1
Thumbnail: Flower 2
Thumbnail: Flower 3
Thumbnail: Fly
Thumbnail: Garden birds
Thumbnail: Garden

The beau­ti­ful gar­den in the back pre­sented some great photo opportunities.

Toronto was our chance to relax. We just hung around and rented movies. When I’m with John I get to see the clas­sics that I’ve missed — every time it’s men­tioned that I haven’t seen a cer­tain title in the store, it’s always met with his button-pushing, “You haven’t seen that?!”. He already has of course, but his mem­ory is so bad that it’s like he never watched them in the first place. This time it was The Shawshank Redemption (very sat­is­fy­ing), Diner (a great coming-of-age film for guys), Four Weddings and a Funeral (ruined by Andie MacDowell’s deliv­ery of “Is it rain­ing — I hadn’t noticed”), and Sideways (fuck­ing amaz­ing). We also saw Out On Bail, which gar­ned many an excru­ci­at­ing reaction.

I still laugh my ass off every time I watch this.