Shopping Carts in Ravines

James Howard Kunstler’s 2004 TED talk “The tragedy of suburbia”
…AKA The End Of Suburbia in 20 minutes.

Earlier this year, Toronto played annual host to the CONTACT photography festival, with venues around the city showing a variety of photography and even video in some cases.

I checked out a random smattering of CONTACT showings, finding them through digital and print listings or encountering them by chance on a walk. One in particular, though, caught my attention in a less typical way, piggybacking on the exhibit’s subject matter itself.

I found out about this particular facet of CONTACT 2008, titled ‘Making My Mark’, via a sticker placed on a Canada Post box in the Junction. Surrounded by marker scrawl, the sticker called out to local writers to come see their tags and art compiled together via photography.

The actual ‘exhibit’ was only a couple frames hanging on a wall inside Wallace Studios amidst a number of other CONTACT pieces. It was underwhelming in person, especially since each photographed tag was thumbnailed in the print, but a DVD was offered and the video is better:

(The sticker faces with the shades are a part of The Crisis Project, a suburban graffiti thing that is worth checking out.)

An associate of mine, we’ll call him Mr. Kismet, was a fairly prolific writer, especially around the Junction. He expressed to me that there was no way he’d turn up at any event summoning him on account of his graffiti. This might’ve been partly paranoia, but was also partly real firsthand awareness of which city/police resources are actually dedicated against him and his peers.

Ohh, crimes of art and passion… the cop-criminal dynamic becomes so much more romantic.

I’ve noticed what seems to be (here’s hoping) the birth of a new political thread, the idea of distinguishing detrimental vandalism of private property from illegal street art.

Lance Cumberbatch (really), director of investigations for municipal licensing and standards, said “graffiti is defined as any lettering, marking, pictures on a structure or building that’s not there to beautify the building.”

Councillor Howard Moscoe added: “I think most people can tell the difference between a tag and artwork.”

Now, this is clearly bomb-ass art. But………

Beyond even the piece/tagging divide, is there perhaps value [as expressed by the CONTACT exhibit] in the raw tags, minimalow on creativity but high on meaning to the writer?

It’s easy to be set strongly against tagging when it has nothing to do with you beyond taking up space on your walls and in your visual field, but people often dismiss the whole phenomenon of graffiti and its various subcategories as equivalent to someone smearing gum on a wall, and being able to do that requires totally overlooking how much meaning this stuff really does have to the many people practicing it.

Are superstrict private property divides really what is most important?
Or is there something worthwhile to be found when dispossessed youth reach out into the world and stake even a partial claim to a tiny piece of their community, trying to establish that “this is me, this is where I am”? Something that, taken all together, shifts from “this is mine” to “this is ours”?

Today’s youth often feel incredibly unempowered and anything that means anything to them is a step away from apathy, a step that I think is desperately needed, extraordinarily messy as the results may be.

At the same time, I sure wouldn’t mind seeing “books” written a few less places in this town.

Big scandal, some poor folk living in a middle class area (no, NOT the building pictured above!):

The quiet street that runs off Danforth Ave. near Broadview Ave. has been in the news since it was revealed that three houses there, valued at nearly $500,000, are owned by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation and are rented to low-income families.

The issue is that Case Ootes feels taxpayer money could house more people for less cost in ghetto highrises, while others argue that healthier communities are built out of better integration.

Neighbour Tom Allen said that he had no idea his neighbours’ home was TCHC-owned social housing, and would not have otherwise found out. The difference between The Bridle Path and Jane & Finch, on the other hand, is pretty immediately apparent to anyone from either.

Just like the difference between the horrible building pictured above, located in a miniature ghetto between Spadina and Bathurst on the south side of Sundad, and these TCHC-owned homes that so tastelessly camouflaged their residents’ worthlessness amongst the fantastically-moneyed citizenfolk who belonged on the street.

Simply dumping all the city’s poor in hidden areas, like the anti-grid Regent Park now under reconstruction, is one thing… but in areas like Weston, that low-cost housing specifically replaces industrial employment on a mass scale, and the huge numbers of penniless people are left choosing between working at Tim Horton’s or drug dealing and gun crime (those are literally the only sort of employment options left in the area).

Weston’s food bank is closed more often than not and lacking pretty much always, Weston has more jobs-for-youth services than jobs to give those youth, and if people in this and similar areas weren’t isolated from the rest of the city, it would’ve been damn obvious a long time ago that we need to do something!

I lived in Toronto’s Weston neighbourhood for the past several years and have, in the past, described Weston as “Toronto’s most long-forgotten neighbourhood.” The area is about a 50/50 combination of rich historical background and contemporary assimilation into the northwest’s ghettos.

For the past few months, I’ve been putting together a profile on the area’s businesses, culture and precarious social situation, and my Weston neighbourhood profile is now up on blogTO.

This isn’t a Chris Jordan photo, but it definitely reminds me of his work.
Check out Chris Jordan on Stephen Colbert elucidating the reality of post-consumer waste streams.

I know I’m not the only person I know who can relate to this, and the fact that it’s an ’80s take-off makes it that much more relevant today.

I’m a city kid.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada has always been my home and home base, without even a consideration of a question.

Although I’ve had partial / dual homes in other towns and cities, I was born in this city and have always been solidly anchored to it.

All other cities that I’ve visited (except for Brisbane, Australia, though I can’t explain why) felt like simple places, products of architecture and street plans, while this place felt not only like it was alive, but like it was alive within me as much as I within it.

I may spend a lot of time contemplating and discussing topics like the impact of genetic manipulation on global politics and the effect of media oversaturation on contemporary freedom of choice, but everyone’s stereotypes aside, I am actually from the ghetto.

Of course, no one recognizes that side of me at all, and most of my friends are totally unable to relate to some of what I talk about, or laugh if I use some of the slang that seems natural to me. I’m not at all trying to front, but I do feel the same desire to represent as most ghetto kids do, to even wear that piece of me out on my t-shirt.

Living with a single parent in an apartment building and area plagued by violence and drugs at the time when crack cocaine was burning at its worst through urban centres, I did encounter these things firsthand as much as a child could really be able. (The weirdest thing I recall is the parents trying to abandon their 18 month old baby at our door with a loud knock and a mediocre vanishing act.)

I didn’t really notice how bad things were, as I knew no different, but I did acquire plenty of street survival skills.

Dizzee Rascal says, “Stay ghetto if you must, just remember to get out,” and I have managed to develop and apply my intelligence and abilities quite successfully, and I am now in a position to choose to make my home just about anywhere in the world that I might want… and for the first time, the question is actually coming up.

The building just right of centre in the photo above contained my first home, and then, seven floors above that, my second.

This is less than one city block east of the Jane St / Finch Ave intersection, an area renowned both locally and internationally for its drug gangs and gun violence.

This hydro-electric tower field contained my first garden, in amongst other ghetto apartment dwellers’ plot allotments. I’ve never had as large a garden since, despite moving to better homes in better neighbourhoods.

(You may recognize this from the site banner at the top of this blog’s pages.)

Now, I’m serious about Toronto seeming as alive as any of its components…

A big part of this sense of life is the city’s intensely multi-faceted nature, being a loose interaction of possibly the most diversely-representative array of communities on the planet, rather than a one-piece cultural unit that can be easily controlled from above.

The urban planning and municipal management of Toronto provides absolutely nothing but the most basic framework in which the thriving subcommunities, subcultures and subclasses live, and it is their lives and actions which truly create this city… making this forest as much a living thing as any of its trees, flowers, birds (mostly pigeons) or squirrels.

For the most part, even the independent commercial interests seem to have an appreciation for the organic and noncommercial and respectfully allow space for it, whether consciously or not. Only the elected and corporate suitdummies curl their toes in rage at this unapproved life and culture.

Thankfully, the corporate city can’t come anywhere close to controlling this life, much as it would like to sanitize, homogenize and package it for corporate purposes. One look at a Toronto tourism campaign shows their inability to even comprehend it.

I say thankfully, because blessed experiences like the one below are found in every area at any moment, created by the connection between an openly-left gift and a perfectly-suited recipient.

Other places, friends may try to lift your spirits when you seem down, but my city will do it for me on its own. Feeling low one day, I took a walk by myself down Spadina Ave and got the warmest and most personal hug a cement surface could possibly offer:

Christopher loves you too, Toronto.

And Toronto can be easy to love…

…but lately, I find it’s looking increasingly less familiar.

Areas I used to like, I no longer trust.

Places that never seemed like they could be anything but playgrounds now feel dangerous to be in. In a short span of time, the urban theme park that Toronto had seemed to be has vanished or grown terribly ugly.

For the first time in my life, despite the attachment of ghetto roots and enjoying plenty of middle-class comfort here…

…I find it possible to feel repelled by Toronto.

And it feels healthy every time I do.

Toronto seems most beautiful these days when I view it from a distance, and I find it harder to find the same perspective from within its midst.

Is it just me, is it just the summer heat and the annual surge of crime and pollution?

If it were truly simply a matter of having gone too long without a vacation, then why does this feeling now grow rather than lessen when I take time out of town?

Is it really the city changing - or possibly something even bigger?

I have been finding myself increasingly engaged in the city that I thought I already knew inside-and-out through blogTO, and so perhaps a big part of this really is in the details of where I focus my time, energy and attention. Perhaps I’m seeing my lifestyle as out of line and projecting it on my environment.

The waterfront walking tour, as a random example, sounds like a great way to get out and do something totally healthy and interesting… but increasingly, I find myself not feeling like I want to be out in much of the city, while certainly not feeling like being cooped up inside either.

A vegetarian co-op house that my friend lives in has rooms opening up and it sounded like it might be a very healthy move for me for this school year. Now I’m hearing of recent swarmings occurring around that exact area of Bloor St, spanning blocks in both directions and including Dufferin Grove Park, one of my favourite in the city. It takes more than that to really scare me, I already live off northern Jane St, but it sure does still count. (14 young offenders were arrested in connection to the swarmings.)

Last year at Trinity-Bellwoods park, panhandling meant this:

This year at Trinity-Bellwoods, panhandling apparently means a five-person fight ending with a fatal stabbing (although I do think the ‘panhandler’ label is being misapplied here, this is how it’s mostly been reported).

I don’t know what the actual statistics are for violent crime this year in Toronto, but what ultimately counts for me is whether I see them myself.

As I said, fewer and fewer areas feel safe and comfortable to me, and everywhere seems to be increasingly populated with people I can’t at all relate to and in many cases don’t trust. The parties are all great from one perspective, but these days few parties of any type in this city - from rap music nights in big clubs to hippies frolicking at drum circles in Trinity-Bellwoods - manage to happen without a noticeable invasion of scumbags and infusion of drunken sexism and violence.

(Funny how, before the drum circle permits, I never saw this issue arise yet squad cars would drive right into the park to shut us down… now that we’re official and regulated, the cops don’t appear even though aggressive thugs show up and the police could actually be doing something useful.)

I’m sure Toronto is the thug capital of Canada, but it also used to be so much else. Where have the adamant and organized anarchists gone, who used to stand up to this sort of street-level scum as much as to our overseeing oppressors, those who were previously so quick to show up at neonazis’ doorsteps with a torch-wielding mob when they began harassing and attacking people?

No one should expect NEFAC types to be the counter-balance to the most powerful and organized of the wannabloods and wishwewerecrips, but the random thugs who barely even have friends are just as much a violent threat given their lifestyle commitment to the principles of lacking principles, seeking out violence and destroying as much as possible… I feel like most of the good people have migrated to Splitsville (a lovely sea-side township in BC), but maybe that’s just what it feels like during the smog-fog season in Hogtown.

Of course, the street shitheads are only a small part of the ‘con’ category. NEFAC’s traditional enemies are a much larger part, and while I see plenty of small-town kids rocking System Of A Down hoodies, unless System has some Factory Farming song that I’ve never heard, you guys don’t get it ’cause you can’t possibly really understand what it’s like to be subjected to the intense corporate brainwashing shitstorm that airs 24 hours a day in a city like Toronto, from every digital device, on every frequency, over every surface and in every environment. A quick look around this site will give you an idea what I mean - at the cottage, I dream about the cottage. In the city, I dream in product advertisements.

The worst I’ve seen in rural areas is that, though the capitalist propaganda machine doesn’t pay you personal dream visits, most of the people around you buy into the neocon wars wholesale and will loudly proclaim their importance and even hold support parades without ever offering any actual explanation for how domestic conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan could possibly be considered to be in the reasonable domain of control of Canada or the United States without white supremacy and global control being underlying principles. That’s awful, but that’s just ignorance, that won’t make you crazy like breathing Toronto airwaves does, where people are so consistently hit with brainwashing messages that they unthinkingly dedicate their entire lives to the addiction of acquiring and consuming the products that actually lie at the root of these capital-driven conflicts.

I’ve also noticed in my time outside the city that, although certain days the air may be so clogged as to actually be unbreathable (medically speaking), our tap water seems relatively superior. In Toronto, I’d never drink unfiltered tap water except when faced with absolutely no other choice (especially with the rundown my inside source Anton gave me on our minimalistic lake-to-tap purification procedures), but outside Toronto a bottle of T.O. Tap tastes like spring water in comparison to the weird-smelling stuff coming out the faucets in other cities and towns. Our local bodies of water are, of course, another story. A Stephen King story, to be exact.

Let me take this to a broader level for a minute.

I’ve wondered for some time if I’d be able to judge - unlike the frog being proverbially boiled alive - if my urban environment and place in this society were making the transition from thriving and progressing while being dangerously exciting to being simply dangerous, depraved and regressive in terms of one’s health (on all levels).

At times, I’ve phrased this as whether I’ll be able to judge when it happens, but high-tech/neo-philosophical hopes for sustainability and the elimination of the roots of social ills (such as poverty) have encouraged - or tantalized - the side of me that places trust in distributed sensible and scientific progress, most especially with the increasing inclusion of synergy and holism in realms of thought and discussion (both deliberately and, I’m even more excited to see, unconsciously).

There is an appeal to the rural commune, the back-to-the-land hippie concept (some such attempts having managed to outlast the ’60s by a good deal, surviving to this day), however there is also a great emptiness that I find I feel when placed in such a closed context. Even in smaller cities around Ontario, I feel a strong emptiness, not inside myself but in the environment. Totally silent night time streets bewilder me, and draw my attention to the key difference between somewhere like Kitchener/Waterloo and Toronto… K/W seems to me to be a set of defined city limits with a collection of buildings and people within them. Toronto feels alive unto itself, to the extent that it is thriving out of control, that it can’t come even close to being shut down by anything from nightfall to blackouts.

I’m very much a product and element of that living urban creature, of one of the ultimate locations of the new, developed world in terms of being able to succeed in manifesting anything one can imagine - and having started with essentially nothing, I’ve already managed to do pretty well (on my own terms) without having even really started trying. When I’m in a rural environment it becomes that much more obvious to me that whether I’m trying or not, my mind has a high-bandwidth connection to the world around it and while I may choose to relax at times, I am functioning most properly when making efficient and dense use of my time. (If you thought calling my input “bandwidth” was weird, be glad I didn’t go with calling my time “my cycles.”)

Obviously, though, the Big City Dream needs to be ruled out as insane when it goes inherently hand-in-hand with destruction of the local and global ecosystem, homogenization of individuals beyond the point of being capable of free thought, and every other thing I see happening around me to varying degrees in my current-day urban environment.

The first question is whether these are happening to increasing or decreasing degrees.

The second question is whether those trends are headed towards the breaking point of reaching permanent problems or solutions.

The third question is the number of times I need to re-evaluate my concept of where that breaking point actually lies in order to decide whether to sacrifice the benefits and theoretical possibilities of the modern urban lifestyle in favour of preserving myself, my knowledge, my resources and my social networks (as happen to be relevant) to switch to a lifestyle that is driven primarily by sustainability, survival and maintenance of true cultural value and places all other concerns second.

Well, I can immediately answer the third question - re-evaluation ought to be a perpetual process up to and likely even beyond the point that the time to make a decision has presented itself and passed behind. That’s a rule of the scientific approach that I apply to everything as much as I’m capable of doing.

I can already answer the first one, too, and the answer is “both.” I’m witnessing the collapse of global systems, both natural and artificial, in nearly every area I care to check into. Simultaneously, I’m watching scientific understanding and technological application race forward towards a point that may not only solve the commonly-considered problems that have typically burdened humanity, but also bring us forward into a new era the likes of which is ineffable in many ways to us now. And, futurist nanobabble aside, there is some reason to think that Toronto can hold a place far superior to somewhere like Detroit in a post-industrial, tech-innovation-based meta-economy (existing as a layer above the now internationally-distributed manufacturers, committing us very permanently to globalization).

Which happens first? Will we see solar energy systems built from technology that places them at a price cheaper than coal, solving the world’s energy crisis and encouraging every Western nation to get the hell out of the Middle East and only go back under properly negotiated, mutually beneficial terms? Or will the dirty nukes hit the still-operating nuclear plants that humanity’s collective blindspot has somehow allowed to be constructed all over the place?

Well, that’s the final (second) question, in a sense… we’re in first place and we’ve nearly won the race, but it doesn’t change the fact that our horse is on fire and we too are about to be engulfed in the flames that have scorched the track and killed everything left in our (flaming equestrian) wake.

It’s up to each informed and free-thinking individual to make a decision for themselves. The decision before us is whether we commit to holding onto the reigns of this lifestyle regardless of how likely a disastrous outcome appears at any given time, placing faith in society/technology/knowledge or even the precedent of erroneous human pessimism, or whether we instead establish a personal danger limit at which we’ll jump the sinking ship no matter what assurances we may receive that rescue is just over the horizon.

And what would jumping ship even mean? Does it really count all that much where your house is in the face of global collapse? Perhaps it means things more like a Wobbliesque general labour strike, or the more recent call, promoted by Adbusters, of a general consumption strike (a little more topical in a culture with no real jobs and too much spending power).

Expanding both sides of the sinking-ship-awaiting-rescue metaphor reveals that the difference between the two greatly parallels the difference between faith in technology and attachment to our natural instinct for self-preservation. The decision may in fact be the same as the choice between our knowledge and our instinct, and while it may seem foolish to ever side with the widely-known-to-be-ignorant human being over the accumulated nature of wisdom… our airplanes _do_ actually work, most of the time, and no one operating on pure instinct would dare set foot in one of those actualizations of insanity.

Might we actually have reached the point in our species’ development where our libraries, schools and information networks can consistently provide us with more accurate and detailed accumulated information than our evolution has left us? Or will it only appear that way long enough for the law of the minimum to come into effect when we slip up and mismanage a single key element, putting us permanently in our place and out of the picture?

Far more than in the past, I’ve been feeling like I’ve got one foot in the nuclear-powered boat and one on old-fashioned dry land - something that might seem like a neutral position to many people, but is definitely a conscious decision for someone born in the ghetto and it’s not at all my default.

I do know where I stand on the question of committing unthinkingly to this society - whether the plane’s engines are still running or not - and that’s “I’m capable of reading the reports and interpreting the stats for myself, and will most definitely be using my own brain’s capacity for logic to decide if the rest of you are totally off your heads and I’d be better off switching from veganism to wild deer.”

I’m deeply concerned by things like the NAU/SPP and our southern neighbours’ elite’s rampant globalized nu-fascist behaviour, but those are pretty hard to simply run from anyway. It seems better to me to be involved in the information streams, spitting back into their “out” tubes.

That aspect of global/continental politics aside, these days Toronto is the issue that’s coming in my eyes and ears and tightening up my stomach. My spidey sense only tingles in spurts, and most of those are tied specifically to Toronto (Driftwood gangsters firing guns at random, serial arsonist, Queen W going downhill). I do also know, in a much more detached and vague way, that things are not necessarily peachy-keen in other urban centres. American cities are struggling with being in America (a chronic condition), many of Europe’s major centres face problems that are unheard of around here, and Australia’s got its own upside-down issues.

Leaving Canada is very low on the likely-list for me, at least for a good while, and leaving Toronto is very low on the list too given that I’m attached to it in some very solid ways in terms of my social networks, my pastimes and, most especially and importantly, my education. All the same, in contemplating whether Toronto is still somewhere that feels like a healthy home to me (I grew up by Jane & Finch with crack dealers in the stairwells of my building, so feel free to be confused about this sentence) my mind naturally wanders to wondering about the other Canadian cities that have touched me enough to feel they could host me beyond a brief visit.

Crime in Vancouver sounds like it’s pretty bad, but Vancouver’s never been my destination of choice in BC anyway because, well, crime in Vancouver sounds like it’s pretty bad. I’ve heard similar things about Victoria lately, but I just can’t picture that in my head. Maybe I should go find out or something, considering my looong term plans have been aiming for the island for some time now, something I’m still holding on paper but reconsidering as I reconsider the entire scope of this location and lifestyle issue.

Calgary is apparently facing a rise in serious crime right now and finding itself short on police officers. I always thought there were enough cowboys to make that up, but maybe Albertans aren’t slangin’ as many guns as everyone makes out. Whatever, moot point, Cowtown is not my type of town - they are not nice to the cows, despite the name, and an organized recycling program is still a complex issue for them - and Canada’s right-wing heaven throwing its overflowing budget resources into filling the streets with cops does not sound pleasant.

Oh, and before you take this as a snowglobed Torontonian viewing Alberta through nothing but Toronto Star headlines, I’ll tell you that I’ve spent plenty of time there, have family there, and effectively lived there for more than one block of time when younger. I got my first driver’s license out there, I watched an oil storage tank explosion scar the sky with a massive plume of black smoke for the rest of the day, I went to indie band and hardcore punk shows, I subscribed to a local street zine thing that flopped after the 3rd issue… I am genuinely familiar. Oh yeah, and the Stampede, I try to repress that though.

Now Winnipeg on the other hand… I’ll admit that writing it off is just pure old-fashioned arbitrary Canuck domestic bigotry (well, and Venetian Snares’ very convincing audio essay).

Montreal, I don’t have a clue how they’re doing. Funny what a little language barrier will do, I hardly even hear about them in the big newspapers that most definitely employ translators of every stripe and have offices in every city. I’m very unhappily missing the anti-SPP protests as I type this, and thus missed the brief trip I’d planned to Montreal. Don’t know when I’ll be going next, and I haven’t been in a while and saw very little of the city the times I did. It certainly does have an appeal for me, though. I admit my firsthand inexperience, but I perceive it to be more similar to Toronto than the rest of Canada’s cities, while having a stronger European influence than an American one. If that’s even a little true, that’s not a difficult deal to talk me into. I bet I’d even get back the fluency that was progressively drained out of me from the time I was removed from French immersion and dumped into the pathetic-rote-memorization-excuse-for-a-French-language-education of the English streams.

As I’ve said, for now, I’m not going anywhere and these are all questions and thoughts towards decisions that can only be made some while into the future… but previously when I left the city to visit another place, whether far away or within the province, I would position myself relative to the 416 rather than simply in that other place, relative to it and myself.

For the first time in my life I’m able to conceive of myself as being independent from Toronto, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to contemplate my position not just in relation to Yonge & Bloor, but to the intersection of the equator and the international date line, or simply to the sun and the moon.

It’s a funny thing now that I think of it, although I’ve been thinking about the “jumping ship” question for years now and debating urban vs natural-communal, the “which urban” question posing Toronto vs X has never really been present in my mind. It’s not wise to let your first breakup change your sexual orientation, and perhaps I should play the urban field before giving up on society entirely, eh?

Well, not that I haven’t already “given up on society” in the lifestyle-anarchist, Crimethinc sense as it is. But that doesn’t determine my course from here, that’s just cultural existentialism, recognizing that by my own declaration I’m free to interact with the world on my own terms, rather than strictly and entirely within the confines of the lose-a-dollar-gain-a-dollar property acquisition system.

And that might just be the final answer I’m missing here, as it makes moot the premise of the second question.

Why put myself in the position of being a victim in the confines of urban society, or victimized by feeling forced to live in a tree on days I’d rather ride an elevator?

Why feel like I ever need to choose between such false dichotomies as The Kingdom Of Western Capitalist Life vs nature’s whimpering and wheezing temples of reality?

I’ve long rejected the ego-trip notion that humanity is anything that can be considered separate from nature, and I now reject the idea of choosing between nature’s evolutionary development and our own cultural/psychological development, as one is derivative of the other. A synthesis of ideas and abilities gained from all sides - along with a healthy round of rejections - is the only logical way to move from here and actually be moving forward.

As for me personally, where I’m at can be permanently described as ‘in my shoes, on our Earth.’ For those who I want to stay in touch with, it’ll pretty much always be possible to locate/contact me and see what’s up… anyone else, well, I’ll write things down and maybe you’ll read about it afterwards.

—

Alright, so all of the above I wrote while at the cottage, where I spent the last bit of my nearly a month out of the city in various places around the province.

Now, having had a chance to return to the city and re-imerse myself in it, this time selectively, I’m feeling far more comfortable and at home again. I feel alright in the sketchy places, and actually feel more comfortable around street kids and people… despite having been pretty deep into street culture in the first place, my time out of town being able to hitchhike and feel safe and being able to trust everyone around me openly has helped me to approach people here with less prejudice.

I’ve been specifically choosing to be around people who I know I care about and who care about me, and all of us seem to be working harder on living healthier lifestyles in our own various ways, addressing our own various problems and vices.

I think the lesson I learned about Toronto is that it’s exactly what you make of it, Toronto has just about everything and you not only can but must select specifically what parts of it you want to observe and engage in, in terms of your social networks, environment and behaviour/lifestyle.

This determines almost entirely whether the place is a very bad one, or a very good one, and I think my perception of it as a very bad thing was directly related to how messed up my lifestyle had gotten and how awful some of the people I was interacting with were.

Labour Day has felt like New Years Eve for me this year…
I’m pretty sure that - once again - I’ve never felt better.
It’s taken a lot of wrestling to integrate everything I learned at Om, but I think I’ve nearly got it under control… and for one of the first times since leaving my teens, I feel happiest being this age and at this place in my life.

Update: this Star article on how rural areas actually have higher homicide rates.

Well, it’s been nearly a month since the Om Re:union Project’s Re:treat festival took place (around the summer solstice) and it’s about due time I come back down to Earth and put into words what I experienced.

Well, actually, if you know me, you know I tend to compile things… so here’s what I actually wrote by hand at the festival, bearing in mind that I haven’t actually hand-written anything in literally years:

One day after the solstice, 2007

I’m sitting on a cliff’s edge overlooking a rocky pair of ponds.

Really, it’s more of a wet rockbed than a pond or lake.
It’s quite nice though.

I’m here for the Om Festival Re:Union Project.

I haven’t been to an Om since 2004, which was the final year for the broadly-publicized festival, open to the public.
In the years since, Om has transitioned into being a closed community, though it remains open to applications.

The moon’s exactly half-full.

I’ve been picking up cigarette butts, as for some reason smokers don’t realize butts are litter. Just an aspect of a whole habit of denial, I guess.

The joints, on the other hand, are rolled with birch bark filters… they’ll decompose, unlike the synthetics and carbon of the cigarettes.

It’s getting dark and the bass just kicked in. Time to go party.

We talk pure Earth but sleep in plastic tents.

At least at Om, the stages are powered by solar panels (very impressive) while teknival’s 15 radical stages require 15 radical gas generators.

Understand that we’re trying our best, though, genuinely.

We’ve been born into a horrid plastic system and at this point in our history it’s literally almost impossible for people to break free, in psychological, cultural or lifestyle activity terms.

I wonder what life will be like for Haven, the 6-year-old boy here who volunteered to be a model for a Mark Jenkins-style tape sculpture body cast. It was pretty funny watching him be wrapped in saran wrap and tape.

Again, people even commented on the waste, but decided it was alright based on its artistic value.

It’s the same thing with computers. They’re disposable, deliberately obfuscated toxic contraptions that consume ever-increasing amounts of electricity.

But they’re helping us break free.

It’s literally impossible to be separate from the system when born into where we are. But we know that and are fighting it… Unfortunately every move we make, at least initially, does damage.

Eventually, we may own land, grow crops, use solar and be thoroughly self-sufficient, and we are trying…

The Om people have long had the plan of buying a piece of land.

It’s also something I’ve thought of alot. Two of my friends have family farms and could conceivably be down, Cowboy in particular, given his description of his lifeplan.

Several quick notes:

• The food (made from the random array of donations everyone brings in and prepared by continuously-changing volunteer groups, then served out freely at regular meal intervals and with snacks out at all hours of the day and night in between) is fucking incredible.

  So much larger servings than 2004 and even more than I can eat… which is a limit that barely even exists. Sushi, salad, rice, soup, chili, lentil stew, bread with pesto, tortillas, and oh my god melted vegan chocolate with granola and mixed fresh berries. One of the best vegan desserts I’ve ever had. The guy making the soup threw some of my ginseng in to energize and revitalize everyone. Very cool.

• I had a wicked conversation with Solomon who gave the hugging workshop and 2 other people about free parties, free culture and the post-society waste niche it exists in, as well as the oft-ignored fungi kingdom, the decomposers with incredible and unique properties that exist in an overlooked niche gap.

  I was telling Solomon that animals are actually closer to fungi than plants, and while I only meant taxonomically/genetically in an evolutionary sense, I just realized that we free radicals behave quite like the fungi, especially the ones that had colonized a tree stump up amongst the camps on the ridge and were glowing bioluminescently in the dark.

  I told Solomon, “You can build a kingdom from the things Toronto throws away.” Free culture, like fungal culture, is often disregarded from outside and thrives on that which is discarded.

• Paranoize came on late and then dropped the best set I’ve ever heard him play. He’s actually like one of Toronto’s best DJs. Given that he knows so many Guv people, it’s very respectable that he isn’t a big sell-out.

I’m very impressed with how much ORP has developed on Om, which felt special but also seemed like a hippie-leaning yuppie commercial weekend escape. This is so much more of a genuine community of this type than I’ve ever seen.

It makes Petra’s assertion that Teknival is a DIY party, not festival, (at least as it exists now) ring true.

I really like the announcements system here. A combination of a walkie-talkie network, message boards + signage, and group-hollering to make good use of word of mouth.

I also really like how much new technology has been integrated. Steve Mann has brought up his hydraulophone, which I’ve only seen at Nuit Blanche 2006 and the Ontario Science Centre. Also, the solar panels (though there definitely is a gennie down at the Home Bass stage now) and geodesic dome tents all over the place.

What with my mom giving me this ‘hippie gothic’ article about a commune that’s still around from the ’60s (not to mention free everything-important-in-life!) and my dad taking me to the cottages with Chris Brown back in the day and other things……. You know, I think I might be a bit like Haven after all.

This genuinely seems like a sustainable (or at least headed in that direction) model for an alternative lifestyle that is neither urban nor rural, but naturalistic.

If the Baby Boomers have infused their children with the energy and ability to divorce ourselves from the suicidal global machine and I’m experiencing this junction in history out of which evolves a synergistic, co-dependent sustainable lifestyle framework, then infinite blessings upon them.

If not, they fucked us all over for SUVs.

I’ve got faith in my mom + pop, though. I think they’re owed some karma.

2 days after the solstice, 2007

I went to Moon Bass to find it littered with shimmery ribbons. I started picking them up to clean them up, then decided to make bracelets from them.

And it turns out Steve, the first person I met at my first genuine party experience, produces and live-PAs some of the best techno I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mike Soma’s set was awesome too, much talked about around the fire while corn roasted.

I feel like I’ve broken through from my individualist hard ghetto sense of social relations and really connected synergistically with alot of people here.

The feeling of operating in a smooth and totally positivity-oriented direction is beyond euphoric.

I think I’ve discovered secular spirituality through this idea of being a part of a greater whole, which is self-aware and consciously synchronized and harmonious with both itself internally and its surrounding environment.

The internet’s a pretty good one for that, too, and really I think it’s an important part of all this.

I always wanted to be a superhero.

“Everybody works and nobody gets paid, because we love it.” That’s the slogan…

I just finished duty as a garbageman…

…which brings to mind the often-hurled attack on anarchism of “who will take out the garbage if everyone does as they please?”

I know plenty of people who are more than happy to do such dirty work, and when I feel like I’m part of something good and positive, I can actually enjoy it myself. I enjoyed scampering through the festival collecting garbage and recycling, assisting people with random things along the way… and when I came home, I enjoyed doing the dishes too, which had been piled high and colonized long enough that I ought to be signing rights agreements with them.

Om showed me, for the first time, what it really meant to be a perfectly-functional part of something…

My entire life to date had been one of ghetto contraryness and cynicism fused with a reductionist education and worldview.

Previously, I’ve always conceived of the world in relation to inner Toronto, my anchor point. Now, I feel much more detached and floating free but as a part of a broader whole, and the bad attitude seems simply stupid to me.

Where I grew up taught me to fight against others to get what I wanted for myself, both in terms of the ghetto childhood and the capitalist system.

Om showed me that, rather than being a bratty cancer cell, I can be a key part in a beautiful and all-encompassing whole.

This is the part where I don’t use the word enlightenment.

Some Om photos, more Om photos.

Now I’m off for a couple days on a site-scouting mission for Northtek!