Jeff Wall, The Stumbling Block, 1991


Germaine Koh, Watch, 2000


Sleeping man (found photograph)


Julius Komjati, Old Man Reading the Bible, 1928

"Every city that is formed collects its slums and the ghost of it. Every city that is formed collects its ghosts."

(Jack Spicer, The Heads of the Town)

A bumpy night flight over the Rockies, the long prairies spread out below. Little constellations of lights: Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay. Grey clouds obscuring the earth. The long jolting descent into Pearson: the eee-yunk, eee-yunk of hydraulics. Blinking white light on the wing tip illuminates cloud-vapour flooding over grey metal. A delicate white web of frost in the gap between the double layered plastic of the passenger window.

The clock in the empty terminal says 12:45 a.m. My backpack comes off the rotating carousel by itself. Out into Ontario December, dry cold, the quick chill settling into the pads of flesh under my eyes, and my toes, and the tips of my fingers. A little grey snow drifting down. Night bus to Malton. Brick apartments flashing by in the dark. I'm alone on the bus, and it's easy to pretend the driver's dead, a TTC Charon, whose face, should I glance beneath his cap, would be smooth and white as bone.

Empty racketing train. Subway stops all abandoned in the snow. Red LED displays: 1:25am, 1:27am, 1:37am. 2am finds me in an all-night Yonge Street cafe, eating maple-glazed donuts, drinking coffee, and pondering my options. No money for a hotel, too late to check into a youth hostel, and definitely unwelcome at a certain suburban apartment. Thrown out of the cafe when I nod off at the table, I walk along Queen West in the cold, and quickly decide that freezing to death is a definite possibility. Into an alley behind a hotel, and into an ungrated steam duct. The corrugated metal smells like piss, but the air pushing past my face is moist and warm. I fall asleep with my big backpack tucked up under my neck like a pillow. In the morning, off to the bus station in my stinky and slightly damp clothes, and on to Ottawa, where it's even colder and windier, and where a huge Jack Shadbolt butterfly on the side of the National Gallery of Canada implies the presence of compensations in this life, after all.
- posted by cjb @ 8:46 AM