date of birth

In the (slightly reworked) words of Art Brut: I formed a blog. I formed a blog. Look at me: I formed a blog.

This weekend, I decided, after having been booted unceremoniously from John M.'s blog -- without its ever having attained cult status, I might add, which it showed absolutely no signs of doing -- it was time to create my own. The idea for this (dare I say, the "theme") struck me on Saturday morning, as I rode from Toronto to Kitchener in the back of my parents' Dodge Caravan, Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump on my Discman foreclosing any conversation with my parents, the kind a 24-year-old woman en route to visiting her grandmother in the hospital should be having. I was, in other words, fifteen again. (You'll remember that the Discman, in 1997, was hardly the anachronism it is today.)

But it occurred to me, as my mother and father spoke in sign language from the front seats, that I was having an idea. Earlier that day, walking back to work from Hero Burgers with the random lunchtime crew that had assembled itself, I had to step over a dirty T-shirt in the alley somewhere between Bathurst and Spadina. I tried to explain to my smirking co-workers what the sight of helpless objects lying where they shouldn't did to me. This was hard.

But somebody must understand. In the spring: gloves, boxers, socks, and odder things lying against curbs, ground into the gritty asphalt, their spirits broken by the ferocious winter months and unthinking Dunlops. How did they wind up there? Did anybody mourn their disappearance? And what, beyond these banal questions, catches my attention and my big, stoopid heart? (Stumbling across incongruous objects is also dead funny, in the way that finding yourself doing the Electric Slide on one foot in a slippery shower is funny. You know, the kind of humour that takes a couple of seconds to ripen). Once, on Emerson Street in Hamilton, my friend Anna and I stopped dead before a photograph of a be-ribboned baby propped on a couch. The photograph was lying on a green front lawn, facing us, several inches from the sidewalk. I wish I had a photo of that photo, because I'd post it here. I dedicate this blog to the strange, unbelonging things of every day, the incidental detritus of our disconnected and connected lives. I dedicate it to the difficulty of expression, to randomness, and to anyone's belief that such a thing might not exist.

Today is an auspicious day. While posting URLs in the margin here, I skipped over to Found Magazine. Today's Find of the Day was from Markus Kolic, a handwritten list he'd found in a desk at his high school, outlining all the things the author would do with ten million dollars. He vowed he'd give his parents anything they wanted, as they had treated him so well his whole life. He would get a career where he could help people -- "A sales man fire man etc." The question is being begged, yes, why would he need so much money to launch a prosaic career (and how exactly do salespeople help people?), but what made me feel funny was where the list was found: Fergus, Ontario. I was born and entirely raised in Fergus, Ontario. Town of several thousand in a world of billions, and surely at least millions with Internet access. I love and hate Fergus, I visited Fergus for twenty-four hours this weekend, I blame Fergus (and its rural siblings across the nation) for ensuring that a Conservative government will be ushered in when polls close in fifteen minutes. It was from Fergus, and it was today.

The first photo I'm posting was taken at dusk eight days ago, on a side street near Dufferin Grove Park. I may have been exploitative by taking it (I was certainly not being helpful), but the urge to document overwhelmed every inhibition. Please send me your photos of sad and wonderful things in their anti-contexts, and I'll try to post them.