Nomadic Tribe Soup

"I love you!" comes from a the backseat of car pulled over in front of a King Street West theater. It is 9:49 pm and I am on my way to a screening that started four minutes earlier. Walking hastily to the TIFF Bell Lightbox, a chic movie complex that honors its patrons by a wall displaying the precise amount of money they donated, I overhear the soft words roll like a red, velvet carpet. It is not a designated lovey-dovey day and the street is particularly deserted. As I'm in full throttle I think to myself "How nice, someone is in the middle of loving." The words resonate a sincerity. It must be a mid-length relationship. They must have known each other for long and one day it must have manifested itself: love. "Hey! I love you!" This time it is louder. I turn to see what is going on. The back door of the car is half open, I see a young man waving his hand, one foot down on the sidewalk. I smile. I return to my business of being eternally late and h...

Past midnight to be precise. Technically morning. This technicality makes me buy the wrong Megabus ticket sometimes between Toronto and Montreal. When you buy these tickets on line, there is a list of departures starting with 00:30 for that particular day but I seem to forget the time in question belongs to 'the night before', for example a Thursday night, past midnight and not Friday when the departure is listed, cause honestly Friday starts at 9 am... So I am late for the night bus the day before because it doubles as the morning one the day after. A day en retard , retarded forever? Gosh, no, it should be in my new year's resolutions not to be harsh on myself. Be kind to this self of mine. Smile, even. A Torontonian again for the past two days, I just went out on my terrace as the snow was melting, about this time of the night. All's quiet and most of my fellow city dwellers are nicely tucked into their condos, town houses, apartment units, basements and bank machi...

"You'd make an awful nurse!" I have been told twice. Not that I harbor some sweet affection, deep understanding or an overflowing nurturing capacity that's yet to be unearthed. I am grumpy and impatient. Some like it hot-headed. In December 2009, when Robin was frail, transparent and wheezing in the bed he would soon die, I was spraying fake saliva into his mouth and missing the point, I was fixing his pillows to the most uncomfortable position his bones could ever bear. Of Robin, nothing was left but bones. Robin had a T-shirt with Alfred Hitchcock's head in a glass bell jar or an astronaut's helmet that sat perfectly atop his jolly good and mighty belly, giving Hitchcock a 3D quality somehow. That was when Robin used to cook lamb shanks, we'd drink quite a few bottles of wine each, there'd be some singing or somber discussion on the state of academia, he would at some point cheer up, recite dialogues from movies I'd never heard of. As Robin melte...

I should have been in bed by now but I didn't get my daily dose of silly things. Some people take a glass of milk before they go to bed, I wouldn't mind a glass of wine or just a few absurdities will do.  Here is Zeynep's puppet. As much I love the mess I generate myself, I'm particularly fond of her messy desk. Now I can get some sleep.

I don't let myself write blog posts because I am behind with some monolithic, oppressive and pending-like-a-pendulum writing. I self-impose sanctions sometimes, imagining one day I can discipline myself and become a productive tennis ball machine pumping out only meaningful words, worthy observations and downright brilliance. But most of my self-education goes awry and the rest goes haywire. Things I forbid myself from doing return before even they are repressed. The Heir of Ossington, who no longer lives on Ossington explains that it's 'the eroticism of transgression', sort of George Bataille for people with a hangover. 'The self imposed limits are too delicious not to trespass', he says or something like that because one can never quote HoO exactly the way he talks. What tickles my fancy now is Yahoo News, the sort of news headlines that chain J Lo's low cut jeans to torn clothing containing corpses in the rubble of an earthquake. Yahoo Canada provokes m...

When he could barely talk, Maxou was already telling lots of stories and asking plentiful questions. "What is your house made of?" he would turn to me while we watched the psychedelic Québécois children's series Passe-Partout -revived all the way from the 80-90s. "Brick, stone or wood?" He was two when Sophie and I took him to Marché Jean-Talon and though he didn't see me again until he was three, he clutched onto that memory and the chocolate covered bananas we ate at the market like some ethereal doudou. Our crush, you see, was simply mutual. Before Maxou and Romane ever existed, Sophie and I were biting into burgers and fries on Avenue du Parc. It was summer 2005, we were on an escapade from the Rebel Music Americas tour and its opening night concert at Kola Note. "I don't feel any biological clock ticking. Mayo?" She was planning a trip with JP to Mexico and why not, perhaps to Turkey. Free. Carefree. No squeaky objects on the floor in th...

Summer rolled down the stairs and evaporated into thin air. Effervescence, thy essence escapes me! ...unlike drunken fruit flies. This summer, besides delving into radio programming, festival hopping, horizontally savoring parks, I've become a master of drowning fruit flies in leftover wine. Tomek had taught me the trick back in the day, with vinegar in a glass, covered by poked plastic wrap. Fruit flies in Montreal are fancier than those in Toronto, so beaujolais and not rice vinegar. I gather they also like lager. Between heat waves, humidity, occasional thunderstorms, joy, pain, a series of visitors, dozens of bagels, broken promises, midnight graffiti'n'stenciling and Gregorian chants...between newcomers in my life, a few exits, a bunch of 'something in the air's, a swim in a lake in the dark as lightening cracked the skies...somewhere in the middle, over the top and underneath I lost track. Losing track, as it were, is a guilty pleasure of mine, ...