The best time of the year to make the drive to Darren’s house is in the Autumn. It’s about five hours door-to-door — bar­ring any traf­fic or con­struc­tion — so there’s a good chance I’ll catch a sun­rise or sun­set no mat­ter when I leave. It’s par­tic­u­larly beau­ti­ful when the leaves are chang­ing and the colours are at their rich­est along the stretches of the 401.

Sometimes I’ll turn on a stand-up com­edy sta­tion instead of music, and it helps take my mind off the drea­ri­ness of the less scenic parts1. It’s like hav­ing another per­son to talk to, except the con­ver­sa­tion goes one way, and they tend to be funny when not overly polit­i­cal2 or Andrew Dice Clay.

Chinese dishes

Zhaliang and clas­sic Cantonese noo­dles. #thingsIcouldeateveryday

I still think of mov­ing back to Toronto, where there’s every­thing that isn’t avail­able to me in Ottawa. But I hate all the things that come with such an unwieldy and poorly amal­ga­mated city. At my age, I value com­fort over excite­ment, and Toronto has become a city that’s bet­ter to visit than to stay.

After meet­ing Mike in London, I knew that’s where I was meant to live, with Bloc Party and Monty Python and The Underground and rainy weather and Portishead and a bil­lion accents and Only Fools and Horses and that stoic British men­tal­ity and Paris just a train ride away. But that wasn’t my fate, and the dirty streets of Toronto are the clos­est I’ll ever get to that.

Magic draft

 

This week­end Darren hosted a heads-up tour­ney, and I walked away with the first pick in the rare draft, six boost­ers, and an extra $50 prize pool for winner-takes-all3. We stayed up till 3:30 play­ing casual and I wasn’t even tired, until the next three days when try­ing to recover from stay­ing up well past my bed­time for a sin­gle night.

Nowadays, Magic is the only thing to take my mind off the thoughts I can’t han­dle. There’s enough cre­ativ­ity in deck build­ing to hold my inter­est, and I’m lucky enough that it’s also some­thing I share with many of my friends. But it still isn’t enough, and I’m left try­ing to find other out­lets to inspire me.

Juicy Bluntarillo

Finger tap­ping on side of nose.

Some days, it feels like I’m judg­ing the dis­tance from the ground and pray­ing. Other days, I find out my favourite song in high school was just an Isaac Hayes sam­ple, not an orig­i­nal trip-hop cre­ation writ­ten for our roman­tic, ado­les­cent fum­blings in the ner­vous dark.

It’s like the whole world is upside-down, and I can’t tell if I’m falling.

  1. Usually the small towns with no charm or per­son­al­ity. [↩]
  2. Cause I never get it. [↩]
  3. Enough to cover my gas money in one direc­tion. [↩]