Roads

Up until last week, I would begin my journey home by walking down College St., which durin my walk is surrounded by Institutes, Research Centres, minor Museums and generally monolithic-looking buildings with their names dispalyed prminently on blue university boards. Then something snapped. I couldn't walk that street again, and so I've been taking a different route, one that involves waiting for the streetcar in an area where low, squat buildings with peeling paint and almost-crumbling facades line the street. Homeless people like this area, and for some reason it seems a good deal darker than that other area described above.

What is significant here is one building in particular. They run a welfare office out of there. I remember coming there when we just cem to this country. And since that period of struggle ended, we haven't been back. I don't know what the significane of this building sitting in front of my face every day now. If there is some purpose to coincidences, maybe it's there to remind me that no matter how many spacious atriums I see and how many marble floors I walk, my childhood, my most formative years were years of falling plaster, rusted fences, rubbish heaps, blinking streetlights and backed-up toilets. There are lessons from that childhood that need to be remembered.

Of course, the building does not exist to send me on a reverie. It is there to serve the needs of the freezing homeless and the luckless drug addicts. If they ever close down its services, I'll be sure to light a small candle.

Dystopian Rambling: "Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself."