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dewlineI’ve been having one of those days. The kind of day where there’s this one tooth in the back that keeps acting up, no matter how much headache medication you throw at your nervous system to suppress the little nuisance.
Once one of those aches takes hold, your concentration is more than likely going to be shot as far as creative effort is concerned. It won’t even have to resemble anything close to an actual cavity.
No, really.
Not being sure that I want to go into much further detail – some people would consider details of dental care to be under the category of “too much information” – but whilst remaining firmly rooted, the annoying teeth still sent out the occasional pang. So, this recurring pang disrupts a number of things, including the writing of cover letters in e-mail form, as well as the writing of actual essays.
Such as this one, yes.
Such was not the case yesterday.
I went to Lowertown yesterday for a barbecue hosted by a friend of mine, and there was no such distraction then. There were other distractions provided by the food and the travel route itself, true. Starting with an inflatable scarlet gorilla on Slater Street at Telus Place. That was an attention-grabber.
Someone actually thought such a “mascot” was worth paying money for. It’s not the first such “mascot” any of us have ever seen, true enough. You can all name at least one example of similar oddities in your own experience.
The impression I got of the northeastern corner of Lowertown is a visually mixed one. Co-op housing side-by-side with relics dating back to the 19th Century, forty-year-old single-family houses left to rot boarded-up, right next to some of the best-kept yards in the city. Housing, next to lawyers’ offices, across the street from a paramedic post, itself kitty-corner across the intersection of King Edward and Murray from the Shepherds of Good Hope.
Lowertown is a proper hodgepodge, the kind of neighbourhood that Jane Jacobs would have been satisfied to see survive into the present, despite the efforts to take it apart in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The widening of King Edward would be the one fly in that particular ointment, of course. Originally, it was to be a sunken freeway splitting Lowertown in two in the name of “urban improvement”, but for the protests inspired by Toronto’s example. That widening of King Edward could have been characterized as a sort of revenge against the resistance to top-down “improvement” imposed by City Hall and developers determined to know better than the people who lived there up to that point.
Anyway, the barbecue was fun.
Once one of those aches takes hold, your concentration is more than likely going to be shot as far as creative effort is concerned. It won’t even have to resemble anything close to an actual cavity.
No, really.
Not being sure that I want to go into much further detail – some people would consider details of dental care to be under the category of “too much information” – but whilst remaining firmly rooted, the annoying teeth still sent out the occasional pang. So, this recurring pang disrupts a number of things, including the writing of cover letters in e-mail form, as well as the writing of actual essays.
Such as this one, yes.
Such was not the case yesterday.
I went to Lowertown yesterday for a barbecue hosted by a friend of mine, and there was no such distraction then. There were other distractions provided by the food and the travel route itself, true. Starting with an inflatable scarlet gorilla on Slater Street at Telus Place. That was an attention-grabber.
Someone actually thought such a “mascot” was worth paying money for. It’s not the first such “mascot” any of us have ever seen, true enough. You can all name at least one example of similar oddities in your own experience.
The impression I got of the northeastern corner of Lowertown is a visually mixed one. Co-op housing side-by-side with relics dating back to the 19th Century, forty-year-old single-family houses left to rot boarded-up, right next to some of the best-kept yards in the city. Housing, next to lawyers’ offices, across the street from a paramedic post, itself kitty-corner across the intersection of King Edward and Murray from the Shepherds of Good Hope.
Lowertown is a proper hodgepodge, the kind of neighbourhood that Jane Jacobs would have been satisfied to see survive into the present, despite the efforts to take it apart in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The widening of King Edward would be the one fly in that particular ointment, of course. Originally, it was to be a sunken freeway splitting Lowertown in two in the name of “urban improvement”, but for the protests inspired by Toronto’s example. That widening of King Edward could have been characterized as a sort of revenge against the resistance to top-down “improvement” imposed by City Hall and developers determined to know better than the people who lived there up to that point.
Anyway, the barbecue was fun.
