SDCLTD 6.66: The Business Is(NOT) True

crazy how you can travel just to end up in the same place you would have been.

i had some research to do that might lead to something and the place that might have what i was looking for was in toronto. so i thought “fuck it, i got a week off ima go to the 6”. you know, get out of the city for a while, make a whole thing out of it.

somehow my trip coincided with iceman and apparently maid of honour dropping. i still haven’t listened to habibti in full. don’t really want to. but the two weren’t linked in any way. i’m a drake scholar not a dickrider.

unbeknownst to me i arrived on victoria day weekend so the place i needed to go was closed until tuesday. this meant i went to kensington market and chinatown the first two full days. there was a mexican pakistani place on spadina which kind of overpromised on the potential of that combination i hate to say. i kinda love kensington market though. i saw a lot of decent vintage places there. i hate to do comparisons but it kind of reminds me of st marks but also the newkirk stop on the q. you know that public plaza right above the station? maybe it was all the jamaican stuff. this doesn’t make sense but it makes all the sense in the world if you’ve been to all three places. 

then i went to shopper’s world by my hotel because my room only gave me washcloths and i didn’t feel all the way clean so i bought a body sponge. they had a decentish fragrance selection for that kind of place. bleu de chanel. even some tom ford surprisingly enough. just black orchid and soleil blanc though, no tobacco vanille. guess that’s how it plays out.

also no matter where i go i’ll find your chinatown. i will eat your various noodles and pork products. kind of regret not getting the eel i want to try eel at some point.

tuesday i visited holt renfrew, which was right by the hotel. i’m not much of a mall guy but i like department stores. i specifically try to pay attention to merchandising just because i like seeing how people view certain brands and how they position them with each other and how they view their customer. or want to view them anyways. i don’t even particularly care for designer i’m more of a workwear guy myself. people in all designer always looked kind of hollow and ironically cheap to me. i’d rather look like the mood board. clothing is art you need to combine your influences in order to create something new and interesting. i know people who would probably wear a birkin with airwalks and i respect them for that

went to college st because for some reason i wanted to see the monocle shop. i severely dislike tyler brule(for a lot of the same reasons i detest tom friedman) but i’ve been an on again off again reader of monocle since 07, which is when lupe fiasco name dropped it on “gold watch”. I bought some blue dream and i went to flying books a few doors down from monocle and bought a copy of no longer human by osamu dazai. i finished it this a little while back and… don’t finish no longer human if you want to feel good about anything. this was the only thing i brought back by the way. i don’t know what this says about me. 

saw the new pynchon but decided not to get it. even though i like the little bit i’ve read and love certain stylistic traits of his(marquis de sod is a great fucking joke) i haven’t quite gained the appreciation for him that i probably should have. maybe i’m just a slow learner.

lowkey i regret not getting a bottle of monocle 02: laurel from their comme des garçons collaboration. the exchange rate was favorable.

i will say that when i was blowing down blue dream on college st while trams were going by on a twenty four degree day(a lot of toronto feels more like philly than new york to be honest, probably the trams), the world felt beautiful. like birds were looking down at me and giving me a wink and a thumbs up. even though they don’t have thumbs of any kind. heard iceman in various cars passing by and fair play to the boy he knows how to hit that right blend of craftsman and messy bitch when he really puts his mind to it.

maid of honour… if you liked honestly nevermind, which i did off rip, you’ll like it.

also as immature as it is i liked the weed packaging with the mandatory french. i liked the mandatory french in general especially on the barqs i got at the airport but “symptomes de troubles psychotiques” is funny as hell i’m sorry. le paquet fort got me goin crazy in different languages! je ne fume que de le carburant!

i wish canada had looser standards for packaging because a mylar with kevin owens winking on it would go dumb hard.

wednesday i wake up and think “oh shit, research!” and because that was the whole reason i went up there in the first place i drag myself out of bed and take line 1 all the way down… and up to york university, specifically the archives of ontario. i think the trip there was the first time i heard The toronto accent. you know, “IF THE BUSINESS IS TRUE?!!” i respect it honestly. strangely enough both of the people i heard using it were filipino.

i learned how to use microfilm, which was cool. i looked at baptismal records from at least four or five different presbyterian congregations, which was ironic given how catholicism was the specter haunting both my irish and indigenous sides. but i didn’t find anything conclusive, which is what i needed. still it was a worthwhile experience. no hard feelings about it.

thursday, i didn’t know what to do. i did the thing i came for which although interesting was a bust. i was going back to new york friday so i wanted to do something besides stay in my hotel room and fuck around on my keyboard. that’s something i forgot to bring up i brought an arturia mini lab with me because i figured i’d have time to fuck around and do goofy music stuff.

i didn’t do any goofy music stuff. 

but that vacation “i didn’t do enough and i have to go back home soon” malaise set in and i started thinking about how much laundry i was going to do on saturday and how i was going to get to and from aew double or nothing on sunday with the 7 train out.

sometimes i wonder exactly how much undiagnosed adhd has fucked me over.

in the back of my head i regretted not linking up with a couple homies of mine. one i don’t talk to as much as i used to, the other… well that was another life ago. no tea to spill, people just move in different directions.

in the wake of all of this i do what i usually do when i’m sad or stressed: i aimlessly ride the train.

i walk a lot. on average about five or six miles a day. i ride the train a lot. just to get some reading done or some thinking. it helps to be propelled in some direction, even if you don’t have a real destination in mind. the best lines for this are the A and the 1, mostly because of the length. the R, too, depending on the time of day and the section of the city you’re in. if you’re in brooklyn or queens you can think but in manhattan, not as much. the W funnily enough is good for this because it’s kind of a fake subway line. the F, it really depends. it’s long but it’s hella crowded sometimes. goes right through dimes square, herald square, queens boulevard.  its not really good for rumination unless you’re going past church avenue.

i like the experience of the ttc way more than the new york subway. look, i had the entire subway system memorized by three. i respect how important it is, the sheer scope of it, how hard it is to run the entirety of it twenty four hours a day. but god… overall i felt less stressed despite being in a different city in a different country with a specific mission. it was still kinda weird but i almost felt more at home there than i do in new york and i was raised here. 

i don’t get line 5 though. it’s a light rail but i have to go down like five stories to get down to the platform. is that why it’s called line 5? shit is deeper than… aethiopes? that’s a deep album. i don’t know man.

somehow everything on the subway is anxiety inducing. it stops in the middle of the tunnel for no reason, people don’t know how to stand. i mean this in multiple contexts by the way. there’s some kind of weird dripping. there’s someone telling me about the greatness of jesus’s light as we’re going over a bridge which… is not a good time for that sort of thing. 

there’s no spatial awareness but that’s just a general new york after covid thing. people here just walk like sims now. i believe mark sabino characterized it as people walking like dickheads when they used to walk like assholes. either way it’s annoying when people walk like they’re on their phones when their phones aren’t even out.

there does seem to be this kind of weird, almost antisocial, grindset optimism that is probably the only thing keeping new york afloat or relevant at this point, long past its reduction to a gargantuan test market. the notion that you have to be a shark in order to get the last few morsels of plankton left. the best plankton on earth, suck my dick from the back. this misguided optimism, if you can even call it that, is a cage and there’s a freedom in knowing it doesn’t get better.

i remember a couple months ago on my train ride home from work someone in my car was screaming that the only thing german about him was that he was a scientist and that one times one equals zero which is why homosexuality doesn’t work. i don’t know what his deal was. could have been schizophrenic, could have been godbody. could have been both. most likely was. that’s just the big apple, baby!

i always wear some kind of headphones on the mta. on the ttc the only thing i listened to was the world around me. i never felt like i  had to close myself off to hear my own thoughts like i do in new york.

those thoughts led me to get off at museum. there were actually two museums for me to choose from as i walked up to bloor st: the gardiner and the royal ontario. ceramics are cool but i ended up going to the latter. they had this really interesting exhibit on bees. which are unfortunately dying out.

have you ever heard of the vulture bee? also known as the carrion bee, they’re primarily found in south america. they specifically feast on carcasses and use their mandibles and a combination of stomach acids and enzymes to break down the meat into a substance similar to royal jelly. kind of scary actually. meat eating bees sound like something from some turn of the millennium  campy horror-adventure gimmick with ice cube and maybe dj qualls but they exist. 

i saw lots of really cool hives and pollens and junk. bees are dope. nature is dope. 

saw some cool taxidermy, some petrified wood, some dinosaurs. you know, natural history. show me a bird of prey swooping and you’ll pop me brother. like you don’t understand how much delight is on my face whenever i see that. a big ass peregrine falcon or a hawk in mid swoop looking like it’s cawwing and i’ll always say “oh shiiiiiit!!!!!!!”. the shit’s cool! but i was trying to find one specific section once i saw it was there.

i was searching in vain for the first peoples section. this was canada after all and as a mixed person of indigenous descent i kind of have to go there don’t i? they killed slightly less of us than the americans did, which… thanks? kinda feel like nick cannon when he made that song where he thanked his mom for not aborting him.

i was about to leave when i saw an arrow pointing to my left that said “first peoples” next to it. you know what having the first peoples exhibit right as you enter is a pretty good bit. classic wordplay. i wish i thought of it. also damn right i’m first.

there was a group of curators or volunteers or something at the front. we greeted each other and they offered to let me touch a seal skin pelt on the table they were seated at. it was really nice actually.

i ended up in front of a pair of moccasins made by my people, the seneca. well one of my peoples because one of my grandparents is tsalagi. even as a mixed indigenous person i’m mixed. then again i once told an oji-cree woman that we could never work because even as far as interracial relationships go that was a bit too far. 

i guess there’s also, like, a border and shit.

my mind went back to aethiopes. maybe my favorite billy woods album. that or hidden places. or maps. there’s a lot of choices. his run since… 2019 has been extraordinary. his resurgence really began in 2012 with history will absolve me but we’re in a seven year peak that doesn’t seem like it will end any time soon. the album starts with him as a child thinking that mengistu haile mariam is his neighbor in the wake of the newly liberated zimbabwe and builds up to a song called smith + cross, which begins with him declaring that “the emotional affair was the best” before commenting on the nature of transience and deflection and decay, referring to his speech as having “sepia tones”, ending with the lines: 

at the museum, eyes glassy from the pain pills/ me and her in the diorama

that very last part… that rang in my head the entire time i was in the room. like i said i’ve been to museums, i’ve seen native american garb and artifacts before obviously but when it’s your people it’s different. you really do get that sense of being preserved or that half-life feeling. sort of an unreality you visit against your will from time to time.

i’ve toyed with the notion that to be an indigenous person on turtle island is to dwell in a liminal state. this is exactly what i mean. i physically exist, i’m a complex human being with multiple dimensions and a complex background and complex even contradictory tastes that for better or worse have brought me to where i currently stand today. yet that existence is only seen as something to confer legitimacy to someone else’s presence. this is the unspoken secret of the pluralistic liberalism of the canadian project. you acknowledge three distinct groups in order to facilitate the elevation of the two who arrived later. 

also left unsaid is the destruction caused to arrive at this point. families broken up, assimilation at gunpoint, languages whittled down to serving as names for way stations and golf courses. for all this talk about society falling apart the americas after columbus have always been post-apocalyptic. 

you might see a thriving willow but trust that it came from a broken branch.

both toronto and buffalo or what was there before them had significant haudenosaunee presence(the name toronto itself comes from tkaronto, a mohawk word meaning "where there are trees standing in the water", referring to a narrows by lake simcoe) but by dint of what side of the border you were on you either ended up as a british subject or an american despite being neither, really. probably why i felt comfortable there it was kind of a strange homecoming in some ways. for both sides of my family actually.

even as a native new yorker this rings true in a way. my presence and the presence of lots of other people who took the now dead regents exam is to serve as a contrast to financiers, startup people and content creators trying to live out their dream of a more expensive charleston. or to give them seasoning, sort of an “eating the other” to quote a fellow fan of the lower case. 

i wouldn’t trade coming up in the new york of the 1990s for anything mind you. it was an amazing time and sometimes i feel like i take it for granted that despite the turmoil of being raised by young parents who either weren’t able to deal with their demons yet or never had the time or resources to, i was privileged enough be surrounded by art and ideas and scholars from the womb. the road to being an interesting person is often poorly paved but patina is developed through wear and damage.

the question is whether or not you’re worth more than the sum of your parts. you’re shaped by your experiences obviously but people are more than just collections of anecdotes and signifiers. at least i hope they are.

it’s draining feeling like your existence doesn’t belong to you. your talent, intelligence, all your gifts either set aside or moulded to keep other people afloat and it’s like… where are you in all this, you know? there’s a foreboding sense that you’ll be remembered after the fact and that you’ll be missed and loved or whatever but what about the present? don’t you need that now? doesn’t entirety need to be captured instead of broad strokes? charcoals are lovely but please use graphite if it’s real.

being a concept sucks ass.

half an hour and a couple stops on the bloor line later(kind of gave me old c train energy, the r33 joints, you know), i was draining a syringe of maple cheddar into a patty at the fancy induced burger, a concept that befuddles more than anything. i wouldn’t say it sucked ass it was a decent burger. kind of strange putting guac on a burger that you inject cheese into though. the fries were actually pretty good, which almost matters a bit more. it’s technically halal. as far as certifications go anyway. i don’t get what’s being induced.

a meme burger and a preroll don’t cure existential colonial ennui but they can offset it for a while.

probably should have gone to the burger’s priest. i’ll do that next time. they have something called the “holy smokes” which is a double cheeseburger with panko crusted fried jalapeños and something called “deception sauce”.

the day i went back i was stuck at yyz for an extra two hours. i don’t know why it’s called yyz neither of those letters are in toronto pearson airport. looked at my phone and put it away. there’s nothing good there. just a sense of futility, which really is the worst. isn’t it? so i picked up no longer human where i left off.

yozo was detailing how he played the buffoon and used humor to mask his fear and anguish as he moved through the world.