March 27, 2007 - Tuesday

March 27, 2007 - Tuesday
toronto: it's definitely over there

Ah Toronto…Sometimes called 'T.O.', sometimes called 'T Dot', sometimes called 'Tranna', sometimes called 'Hey, What's With all the Chinese Road Signs?'

City of many tall buildings. City of a billion traffic lights. City of a thousand ethnic foods. A city that boasts a sixteen-lane highway, and the world's tallest free-standing man-made structure in the world: The Eighty-Car Greater Toronto Metropolitan Traffic Pile-Up, located daily on highway 401 in the general vicinity of the Don Valley Parkway.

Not that there's anything wrong with the driving in Toronto. Or rather, it's not any worse than the Dakar Road Rally in which french people in souped up Fiats race through tiny Beduin villages knocking over screaming people like bowling pins and turning the family goat into peanut-butter. No, driving in Toronto is fine as long as you're so goofed on morphine you can be dripped into the driver's seat of your car through a small opening in the window. Which I wasn't. Which caused all sorts of sudden loud and hateful outbursts at the backs of people's cars. People who I shall call 'Road-cretins' because they drive like such.

It's a tricky thing to try to speculate why there is such a deficit of acceptable driving in the place. Perhaps it's the colossal grid pattern which makes up the core Toronto area (621 sq. kilometers, discounting the outlying suburbs such as Etobicoke, Scarborough, and North York –all of which look like Soviet block mining town slums); a grid pattern in which 3 million-odd people use only three streets: Queen St., Yonge St., and Bloor St.. Sure, there are other streets available such as Spadina St. (which sounds like a vaginal infection) and Avenue Rd. (which has about as clever nomenclature as 'Street Blvd.') but these are rarely used. A lot of the reason is that all of the side streets which empty out onto those three major roads are one-way against you.

When you think about it, this actually defies basic reasoning and a number of established laws of physics: take two streets that run parallel to each other like Bloor and Queen. Now, examine how Huron St. runs perpendicular to them, crossing both. Yet, if you try to turn onto Huron from either Bloor or Queen you're met with a one-way sign pointing straight at you. It seems that all the streets are designed like a dyslexic's lobster trap –you can exit the streets to a major road yet there's no way to get back onto them. Which raises the question: how do people get onto streets like Huron in the first place?

Many of my friends who were staunch anti-Torontoniasts in the past now live in Toronto –China's most populous city. They claim it is great, they claim it is wonderful, they claim it has everything. I don't see it. And when I say this to them the answer invariably is: 'Oh, you have to live here to get it.'.

Try this on anybody you meet from Toronto, even if you've never been there. Tell them you dislike Toronto. Like clockwork the response will be 'Oh, you have to live here to get it.' like they're privy to some giggling secret they want to tell you –will only tell you, if you move there. Secrets like the invisible airlifting of cars onto minor side-streets, the reason homeless people camp out in the middle of intersections, and why the CN Tower and nearby SkyDome looks suspiciously like an alert penis with nearby testes.

Parking is fine in Toronto as long as you're not driving anything larger than a slice of brie. That is to say you can't park anywhere. As stated above, the side-streets are inaccessible, and if you do manage to reverse onto one you are confronted with signs like: NO PARKING BETWEEN 12PM AND 1153AM, or PARKING AVAILABLE EXCEPT ON MON. TUES. WED. THURS. FRI. SAT. SUN., or PARKING ONLY IF YOUR CAR IS LIME GREEN, YOUR DOG'S NAME IS SKEETER, AND THERE IS A LUNAR ECLIPSE. Normally these signs are hidden behind a large tree that has been employed by City of Toronto to frustrate you and boost internal fiscal revenue.

Which brings us to another interesting tidbit about Toronto: it is policed solely by traffic cops with silly hats. These people are the biggest bringers of money to Toronto –easily surpassing technological, industrial, and corporate accruements with paid parking tickets. I asked a friend why there was no discernable actual police presence in the city and was told: "Because they're all stuck in traffic."

Upon arriving to Toronto I quickly learned that it's not the man with the biggest gun that rules the town, it's the man with the biggest parking space. Fortunately one of the friends I was visiting had exactly such a space near the 'downtown core'. Or what passes for the 'downtown core'. You see, I know people living in different time zones in the city who claim to be living in the 'downtown core'.

As far as I could tell downtown Toronto is divided into seven major areas which are aptly named: 'Chinatown', 'Hide Park', 'Garbagetown', 'The Spandex', 'The Bitches', and 'Yoneo' (which, as it turns out is 'Yonge', but due to the use of an unfortunate font reads like 'Yoneo'). I was briefly in an area called 'Kensington Market' which had a dentistry clinic happily boasting 'The United Smiles of Kensington' thus making it clear that whoever made the sign has never been to the real Kensington in London; where seeing a real dentist or a real smile is like seeing a real unicorn in a Mosque.

Toronto was originally called 'York Town' but ditched the name when a bunch of assholes set up 'New York'. In a desperate bid to distance themselves from that American city they jammed York Town with enough West-Indian restaurants to make the whole place smell like curry. This, in addition to hiring M.C. Escher to do the city planning, made them unique from the Big Apple. Thus, with New York smelling like Italians, and the newly named 'Toronto' smelling like Trinidad, they had attained suitable autonomy.This autonomy is fiercely waved in the face anybody passing through Toronto –which takes about eight days due to heavy traffic. "We are Torontonians, and Toronto is great!" they scream. Other than it teeming with actual living people (the city with the most living people in Canada) it's hard to see why it's better than say, Montreal or Vancouver. Plus, you have no choice but to believe them because there is nowhere to park and actually see why Toronto is great.

Surely, in Toronto great things are going on but nobody seems to know where or what they are. During the weekends this relegates it's entire population to driving aimlessly around whatever streets they can access and asking each other where something is happening. There is the promise of something about to occur, but you always seem to hear about it from someone else after it's happened. A friend of mine said that the place is 'soulless'. That may be so, but I'd be more inclined to say it's simply suffering the dementia of constant anti-climax.

Well, regardless, it's certainly better than Ottawa; where all it's actual living people are living in Toronto.

Yes, in Toronto I saw many live humans of various shades, genders, and creeds, especially in the 'The Spandex' where I did most of my wandering. It is interesting to note that everyone I saw in this high-end district; man, woman, child, baby, and pet phlegm-ball was wearing an iPod. Even the homeless were wearing the things. My hunch is that they were not listening to music but receiving instructions about circumnavigating it's Gordian Knot streets without ever once looking up. Or, they were being told that something is happening somewhere but the details are vague. Either that or they were constantly being reminded via some central omniscient metropolitan brain-core as to why Toronto is a great place to be… But only if you live there.I may never know.