Pssshh, ANOTHER landscape?

One of those quiet days

Mercury Coffee Geeking

Terror Lake @ Sneaky Dee's

I love these guys. I can't stress that enough. Terror Lake has got to be one of the most earnestly enjoyable bands doing what they do in Toronto right now. Do yourself a favor and check them out at a live show if you come across them.

I usually start my workdays at Morning Glory where they've just recently opened up the patio out back. It's a small breakfast/lunch joint that's run by Jacki, Doug, and James in Corktown (conveniently located next to a methadone clinic, talk about a one stop shop). I still get excited over the little variations that are put in front of me in the mornings (and by mornings I usually mean noon) because no matter what it says on the menu, everyone adds their own flair to the menu's already unique combinations. Unique may be a slight exaggeration but things are definitely made fresh which, I must point out, is unusually rare in this city. Bleh.


Today Keef came in with a damn rad ride. He does custom jobs on just about anything but he shines especially on Vespa scooters. This is an example of some of his handy work.
Note: His signature off center license-place marks (the white patches).

It was a warm and sunny day

I tried hard to make this blog into another bleeding heart diary I always come across but I guess it's another one of those inevitable things that just happen. Like how accidents happen when you're rolling around in the city. There are times, after having a few, I rip around traffic like I'm invincible and nothing could ever happen, pulling off the stupidest moves just to cut out a few seconds and I get away without so much as a second thought as to what could have happened. Then there are times when you could be the most careful grandma rider and throw down all those gay signals and wear a million LED's on your body and bike that you look like a retarded Christmas tree on wheels and poof... some jackass text messaging on his Blackberry plows right into you going for a parking spot in front of a fire hydrant. Such is the ballet of life. But I digress. My ambition to publish a blog slightly more alternative that the existing ones stemmed from absolute naivety but still I tried and now I'm sucking on my proverbial foot as I try and justify the development from alternative to mundane and standard. Oh well. Who actually cares anyway?

I visited my roommate who was at work in his office downtown after receiving news that he had gotten run over by a car swerving into a parking spot on Adelaide. His front rim was totaled but lucky for him I had a spare and was looking for an excuse to roll around. Needless to say on a day when it peaks 19 degrees Celsius I didn't really need an excuse and so I was happy to liberate him from his mechanical woes. I took a little detour to the Eaton Center (big mistake) and picked up a new phone because my current one had stopped working. Ironically enough, and I'm sure many of you can relate this frustrating but hilarious scenario, it started to work again when I was explaining my woes to the sales lady. Long story short, I walked away with a Blackberry. I've entered a new low. Not only can I write emails on the go, but I can keep myself updated with Facecrack as it comes with a handy application that doesn't charge you extra for using it. I smell absolute market research coverage. But that's a whole different issue.

When I finally got down to my roommate's office he was waiting outside for me and I gave him the wheel and had a curious itch to satisfy. It's been a while since I've stepped into an office setting and so I reluctantly followed him into the building to see what it was like inside. The first thing that hit me was the smell of bleach and other such institutional sterility products, like cologne and beigeness. I spent a total of maybe 10 minutes in the joint and witnessed such sad, and joyless colors, fading away in a swarm of florescent buzzing. I wished I could pull the fire alarm and flush them all out into the warm breeze I was just struggling against outside but alas, more Blackberries needed to paid off, more Yaris' needed to be purchased.

I guess I could be jealous of the amount of money they were doing for more cerebrally enlightened work (what they actually do in this case isn't important), but definitely not on a day like today. But who am I kidding? I want the same end result but I just don't have the same requisites to get to that point quicker. I'm not retarded, I just don't want my soul sucked out of me. Kudos to you all who can maintain. I applaud you, I really do. I actually know some of you who go though that every day and can still take the piss. How long until the next beautiful day?

Celine Dion Still Sucks

There's such animosity being thrown around lately and I think much of it is due to the fact that we are running out of ways to define ourselves in an original manner. The role of an artist, for example, was once thought of to be an outsider of society who looked in and painted images in the way he regarded it. That very synopsis (if you can call it that) is now considered cliche (for lack of a better word) purely on the fact that it is perpetuated by so-called individuals who make it a conscious point to adhere to that given stereotype. Now we find ourselves defining an identity by virtue of something we are not.

My musical tastes are more refined because I don't listen to Celine Dion.

So you qualify your essence based on a the subversion of an easy target. Good job. So what the hell does that mean? What does that say about you? That you don't have poor taste in music? So what? Not everyone likes the same thing so you're a fucking moron for liking that and you're not? If that's the case there must be millions of fucking morons running around the world because that's how many people bought her album. I was also privy to the line of thinking that the world is full of idiots with bad taste in music and what that meant was that the world is also full of idiots making stupid decisions regarding things that matter like say, driving and SUV or stuffing their mouth pieces with bat-anus big macs and throwing our world into the pisser. You get to a point where you can just start to hate everyone and everything that moves because HEY FUCKING WAKE UP: NO ONE THINKS LIKE YOU! You're SOOO unique and if you buy these clothes, read this magazine, and eat this shit you're proving to everyone you're not THEM. God no! You're the one of the cool people, you wear DIESEL and so you must be helping the environment.

You see what just happened there?

On the flip side our interweb crazed society has allowed for many people to make more informed choices about their lifestyle. We can choose to be conscious about our actions because we are granted the luxurious (which it shouldn't be) information of the processes involved. We aren't easily fooled by marketing ploys and don't just blindly eat the shit that get constantly thrown at us. But my point is that we still ridicule the ones we see as not enlightened. I use the word 'enlightened' because I'm trying to illustrate the point that it's absolutely just as detrimental to continue the 'othering' of those we see fit as ignorant. If we're so 'enlightened' then it's our job to spread the gospel. So to speak. We're going to lead by example. Follow us into the new form of mainstream and don't be afraid of being there. The line of rationale that promotes these false virtues would eventually propel us to a point where we revert back to stone-age mind sets that subverts anything and everything for the sake of that itself.

Dude, Celine Dion sucks balls man.

Yeah totally. Let's just watch these three hot chicks barely play their instruments while they drone on in bad poetry and sayings in different languages we don't understand.

Yeah man. That's art.

Yeah.