i like to walk. it’s an efficient means of locomotion, it hardly contributes to global warming, and it gives me time to take in my surroundings in a very immediate and meaningful way. i also like to look out of my 24th storey window and look at the sprawling metropolis that is toronto. i’ve been looking out on the horizon for some time and something that has grabbed my attention over the past few months is this collection of several buildings that are perfect triplets just on the edge of the near horizon. i’ve often wondered what they were and what purpose they served and i’ve wanted for some time to check them out. so this weekend, shonagh and i went for a long walk to pass through the districts between here and there and to see for ourselves what they were, in spite of blisteringly cold winds and otherwise inhospitable conditions.

there were several sights that grabbed our attention. first was an old-style burger joint proclaiming the “jumbo”-ness of its burgers. if it had not been closed, and if we had not just gone for brunch at jane and bloor, we might have gone in and sampled the burgers for ourselves. there was a lady waiting outside of the restaurant (there was no bus stop or other reason for her to loiter outside of the establishment that we could see), so we knew it must have been worth a wait!

north of st.clair, the areas turned a little ghetto. row-housing and the kind of bizarre toronto-front-yards composed of fenced-in-brick presented themselves with a kind of unabashed self-confidence that seemed ridiculous to me, coming from the land of enormous grassy front-yards. and this was a nicer part of the walk! the districts became far less inviting and self-possessed the further north along runnymede we walked.

other interesting landmarks presented themselves along our trek. the “lionz den” lounge was an excellent example! this was some sort of lounge/bar/establishment that was more fortified than some castles i’ve seen! bars adorned every set of windows and doors, and shonagh speculated that it must have been some sort of mob establishment. it seemed plausible to me considering that they had a large factory or warehouse made of concrete attached to it. i suggested that we go in to make our walk more of a pub-crawl, but since the place appeared closed (abandoned?), we ultimately decided to pass on that plan of action.

the other side of the lionz den factory/lounge had something called the “cambridge education group” attached to it. apparently, even google doesn’t know exactly what the function of this organization is. whatever it’s purpose is, they have an awful log of square footage to do it in.

the other areas north of alliance avenue there were progressively less desirable places to live. it struck me as odd that in a city of millions of people, in which real-estate was so precious that people would pay millions of dollars for a couple thousand square feet of condo space, that there could be such unappealing residences on streets with such auspicious names as “Homer Street” or “Hector Street”! I wanted to move into the neighbourhood just so that I could have an address on some street named after some fabulous ancient greek hero! it would totally have been worth the investment in multiple home-security systems. on the opposite end of the “coolly named places to be” spectrum was the completely unfortunately-titled “BM Sports Bar and Grill” on weston road. i don’t know what “bm” stood for in this particular context, but where i’m from, any place that serves food and has “bm” as its chief identifier might not be such an inviting prospect.

after about 8km of walking and an hour of exposure to biting cold wind, we decided to call the quest for my triplet buildings a bust. north of eglinton, we found some high-rise apartment building that i recognized, but i knew was still a ways away from where i wanted to be. but it didn’t matter to us. we had a lovely walk filled with great conversation and some good cardiovascular exercise. i later found that if we had walked a scant 4km further towards the 401 (well, precisely TO the 401), we would have found my building trio, so maybe some other day, i will make the trek again, with better directions and bearings.

we took a cab home, had a nap and called the adventure closed.

that would be the end of the story, if not for the oscars which were also on that night. we watched those and then called it an evening.

and that would be the end of that story, if not for the fact that that was the last date we will have for some time. shonagh called me yesterday (tuesday) to tell me that we would not be seeing each other for some time because she felt that i (still) needed some space to obtain closure over my previous relationship.

it broke my heart. it breaks my heart now. i blame myself for being so open and indiscrete about everything that happens to me. even now, i ponder the wisdom of committing these thoughts to the internet, where they are as public as they possibly can be. however, enough of my friends have noticed that i’ve crippled my website that i feel that there must be some efficiency to be gained in putting my “news” on my website.

getting back to the point regarding discretion and my split with my shonagh, i really don’t think that my closure over lorelle was an issue. sure i still have pain and anxiety over that relationship – but that doesn't mean that i don't or can't recognize a great and wonderful thing when it enters my life. shonagh was completely reasonable to protect herself from harm over the threat of being a “rebound” – especially before she invested too much of herself in the relationship. i think if the situation was reversed, i might have the same instinct. as crushed as i am, i’ve decided to take this time to re-evaluate and re-focus on thinking about my life with the possibility of a future with someone.

i’m not happy to be “alone” again, and i miss her already so very much. i miss stroking her back, rubbing her feet and her mucular legs; i miss her smile and her voice and her laughter and her teasing. i miss finding her hair on my floor. i miss the smell of her perfume that still lingers in my apartment. i miss the sound that her mouth made when we kissed. i miss all of the stories about her crazy friends. i miss all of her. but i think (i hope) there may still be chapters in that story left to tell. and perhaps that will be an adventure for another week.

- g

i pretty much hate guns. i think my detestation of firearms began in 1993 when i heard that brandon lee killed himself with a stupid prop gun. before that incident, i naively felt that the only justification for learning to use guns was that if i should find myself being held by crooked cops under the service of some drug czar, and i disarmed them of their glock somehow, that i should need to know where the safety is and learn to take them out before they managed to take me out. however, ever since the end of the lee dynasty, i forewent my childhood cops-and-robbers infatuation with guns and weapons and learned that the only thing that could come from guns was misery. so it was with no little misgiving that i agreed to go out to the last imason company event, paintballing at sargeant splatters.

the morning started out nicely enough – my new neighbour, kerri, nicole and shonagh and i went out for a tasty brunch at the local sunset grill… and then on to the main event… paintball! i haven’t been to paintball since… well, pretty close to the time that poor brandon cashed in his chips. i went to this huge outdoors field with wally and mike and got royally lit up by our group and the opposing team, and had not such a good time of it. i was resolved to do better this time.

most of imason turned out for this alpha-male testosterone-off (including most of the women who work there – which was a fantastic surprise). most of the girls had gone out the day before and bought matching winter-camouflage outfits that were wicked cool and made me instantly regret not having done the same!

sgt. splatters offered a huge warehouse of pain complete with gutted automobiles, little shanty shacks, and a nice sandy floor that gave one the continual sense that one was mounting an offensive on some self-contained beachhead, complete with sniping paintballers in second-level vantage points. i don’t think that there was a single round of the six or so that i played in which i wasn’t eliminated within the first five minutes, thus verifying that i was perhaps the worst excuse for a soldier ever to grace the face of the earth, and making me glad to have spent my time in philosophy school, rather than in military college. in the most favourable scenario, where all i had to do was lay low and pick off the invading force, i got picked off by friendly fire by having several precisely fired paint pellets shot between my legs… that was a real treat. thankfully, i don’t bruise at the best of times!

the games were chaotic excuses for carnage. i wore my contact lenses but visibility was still terrible. girlfriend turned on boyfriend, colleague against colleague, peer against student… it was nutso. but everyone had an exhaustingly great time. our team-spirit-mascot, bob was a champion, looking every bit the schwarzeneggerian-hero running about, strafing his seemingly endless supply of paint pellets, and getting the job done. dubravko, our serbian super-soldier with real-world military experience, took about 50 shots in the “starship trooper” scenario, and my boyfriend, jim stole the show by stealing the enemy “cardboard box” and running it all the way back to our home base!! he’s my hero!!

even though i may not have achieved much more over the course of the day than showing off my new sweetie, shonagh, this adventure did reinstall in me the hard-won respect and distaste for combat that i have always had, and gave me a great bonding moment with my peeps at imason. i think that the skydiving event that i am planning for summer will be less violent (and hopefully less painful and consequential, in terms of injury), but probably not any more exhilarating!

- g

ps. as a side note, and in consideration of the incredibly tardiness of all of the three or four adventures for which i am in arrears, i should make a note of what i did last friday. jim asked me friday morning whether i would be up for going out to shmooze after work. i have already conceded one adventure to clubbing in toronto, but friday was too crazy to not comment on.

jim and his buddy mike had plans to go out and only one other imason was slated to go out – a cool cat named brian. so the four of us went out at 6 to shmooze to avail ourselves of ridiculously underpriced alcohol. apparently, the law in ontario states that an establishment cannot change the prices of their drinks from the time that they open to entice drunkards to come in and sit their asses down during the daytime and neglect their jobs/families/loved ones. this is in direct contradiction to my upbringing in alberta where the bars can charge whatever they want and then arbitrarily raise the prices once you’re good and plastered. so i had like three beers in the first hour and it was all downhill from there.

i was originally planning to go for a couple of hours to chat with jim and brian and then go home. i ended up staying until 1am or something, not knowing how the hell i got home, and sending several totally incoherent text messages and voice mails to my girlfriend shonagh. that she is still speaking to me is a mystery for the ages. however, i did learn what people in toronto do at these meat-market clubs, and i learned (once again) that mixing your booze can only result in a completely wasted day-after.

ed: this one was SO far off, i wonder if they even read the answers that i entered?!?! - g