Re-reading

"I've made my life into a script. My calendar is my blocking, my cellular phone is to remind me of my cues. I'm late, its part of the performance, this character only ever shows up on time for dinner, dates, and disasters. My stage right now is a street car. I play myself as a writer, I'll exit at the front of the stage when I've arrived at the end of the line. The scene asks for the white noise of multi-cultural toronto. Languages bleed together in to form a polyglot ambiance. It fades out to only the humming of florescent lights, illuminating advertisements."

I wrote this a while back when I felt most trapped in the city and in my life. Re-reading some of the writing in a couple of the old notebooks I brought with me, for some reason this one stood out. Maybe because I recognize this feeling as being something wholly Toronto. The line, "I play myself as a writer, I'll exit at the front of the stage when I've arrived at the end of the line" didn't quite make sense to me, I thought I had just written it in a hurry, and a lot of my hurried writing doesn't make sense in retrospect. But, after thinking about it for a second, I remembered when I wrote it - On a Spadina street car waiting to get off at the subway one winter morning on my way to work. And the context brought the whole piece back viscerally to me. I think the reason it caught my eye was because its so specifically Toronto. Its something I take for granted for when writing it, or reading it, while in Toronto.

It feels a bit like the dead.
,, Tu " fui
,, Ego " eris
What you are, I was
What I am, you will be

These words marked the entrance to an old Crypt in Brno, Czech Republic.