Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
For more than 140 days, all the lights have been on in the house behind me. Every single bulb is ablaze 24/7. The house is for sale and has been on the market since last October, with at least one changeover of real estate contract that I am aware of. It is not a bad …
The thermometer outside my bedroom window fell to its death on the patio below the other day. I am not sure if it jumped or if it was pushed. I must admit it was not the most accurate temperature measurer, except for first thing in the morning when the sun had not yet climbed high …
It really wasn’t my fault. I did not intend to get on the wrong side of the law. But it happened none-the-less. It all started sometime after the pandemic showed up. In addition to a virus gone viral, COVID-19 also brought people to suburbia. In the “before time,” at approximately 7:12 each morning, the suburbanite …
I sat outside on my deck in the sunshine a few days ago, when April was behaving a little better than right now, reading the New Yorker while freezing my ass off but stubbornly clinging to the notion that being outside was better than being inside. My all-weather fake-o wicker loveseat emerged from the winter …
It’s pretty much business as usual around here, in the cozy bedrooms north of civilization. Which is to say, as usual, there is rampant inaccessibility, unavailability, and inedibility. Follow along with the bouncing ball, if you will. There is a bus that goes from Newmarket to the Toronto Yorkdale subway station and back. This bus …
This morning, my walk to the gym started in fog. I mean the weather, not my brain, but actually my brain was in fact doing its best to complement the weather. It is Saturday, after all. It is just past nine, after all. The grass in front of the houses along the road has turned …
Downsview Park is not a park and has no view. Discuss. Maybe that’s not entirely true. From the GO train upper level you can see the CN tower way in the distance, like a beacon of refuge for suburbanites yearning for food from a menu that isn’t laminated or on a sign over the counter …
The 905 is the nickname based on the area code for the suburban sprawl that stretches East, West and North of Toronto and smacks up against the border of the 519 and 705 (area codes that used to be in the ‘are you nuts?’ category of commuting consideration but are now the new normal coordinates …
This just in: recent research has shown that the most significant rise in shopping dollar expenditure in the past 10 years has been at big box and warehouse stores, not via online retail purchases. At the risk of dating myself, I remember when the word ‘ecommerce’ was coined and the time when our firm’s nascent …