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...aka an Impromptu coauthored by The Internet, Me this Morning, Me back in 2004, and Molly York, Mnemonist and Protagonist
Near where I live there's a viaduct
Where people jump when they're out of luck
Raining down on the cars and trucks below
They've put a net there to catch their fall
Like it'll stop anyone at all
What they don't know is when nature calls, you go (The Barenaked Ladies, War on Drugs)
"Winter turned into spring, and on the news they talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder and suicide rates, and how they were building a suicide prevention net on both sides of the Bloor Viaduct to keep the jumpers from jumping. The commentators scoffed at the project: the net might keep them from jumping there. They would jump onto the subway tracks and out the windows and off the buildings and from other, farther bridges. You couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to die." ("Midnights on the Bloor Viaduct", On Spec Summer 2004)
Sometimes I imagine that my grave is at the north side of the subway tracks in Osgoode Station, southbound. Every night after work when the train comes in, it passes that spot and I shiver as a couple dozen commuters idly walk over my grave.
This doesn't happen on the northbound. Or at Wellesley Station, or Bloor, or Bathurst, or any of the other TTC stations I've been at lately. I've tested it.
(I dreamed about the Bloor Viaduct this morning: it has a fixed place in my dreams, one where there's always a stiff wind blowing and you'd better hold on to the railing or you might get blown off the edge. There's no net in my mental Viaduct. If you go over the railing, you fall.
The thing is, there's no highway either. There's only the Don River, massive and wide and churning, spread out over what's really a half-dozen commuter lanes and green-blue as the Mediterranean, clear enough to see the rocks and driftwood and the shapes of fish moving within it. The Don River as it was before the city ever existed sits there waiting, and it's not malevolent nor welcoming. It'll take you away if you want to go, floating face-up like the Sleeping Giant, like the Lady of Shallott, like pieces of Osiris.
But it's you that has to jump.)
If you read this in a de Lint book, it'd be a spirit journey. If you read it in a Garth Nix book, it'd be Death. If I described to you how all these things connect in the back of my head, doubling in on each other, it'd be either New Age Bullshit (tm) or the beginnings of a story starting to pick up steam, little Katamari-idea-ball. This is the only level upon which I can really gut-deep relate to cyberpunk: the sheer amazing love of reaching out, feeling the strings of how imformation connects to each other both subtly and well, the webs of patterning and happenstance and coincidence and enemy action that we sit in every day and don't see until we squint just right.
So I have something old and something new, and something borrowed, and while my girl Molly doesn't so much get blue when she informs me she's thinking about dying, it's more grey, that's close enough.
And then if all those things come together, one looks up after an hour and finds oneself writing.
Near where I live there's a viaduct
Where people jump when they're out of luck
Raining down on the cars and trucks below
They've put a net there to catch their fall
Like it'll stop anyone at all
What they don't know is when nature calls, you go (The Barenaked Ladies, War on Drugs)
"Winter turned into spring, and on the news they talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder and suicide rates, and how they were building a suicide prevention net on both sides of the Bloor Viaduct to keep the jumpers from jumping. The commentators scoffed at the project: the net might keep them from jumping there. They would jump onto the subway tracks and out the windows and off the buildings and from other, farther bridges. You couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to die." ("Midnights on the Bloor Viaduct", On Spec Summer 2004)
Sometimes I imagine that my grave is at the north side of the subway tracks in Osgoode Station, southbound. Every night after work when the train comes in, it passes that spot and I shiver as a couple dozen commuters idly walk over my grave.
This doesn't happen on the northbound. Or at Wellesley Station, or Bloor, or Bathurst, or any of the other TTC stations I've been at lately. I've tested it.
(I dreamed about the Bloor Viaduct this morning: it has a fixed place in my dreams, one where there's always a stiff wind blowing and you'd better hold on to the railing or you might get blown off the edge. There's no net in my mental Viaduct. If you go over the railing, you fall.
The thing is, there's no highway either. There's only the Don River, massive and wide and churning, spread out over what's really a half-dozen commuter lanes and green-blue as the Mediterranean, clear enough to see the rocks and driftwood and the shapes of fish moving within it. The Don River as it was before the city ever existed sits there waiting, and it's not malevolent nor welcoming. It'll take you away if you want to go, floating face-up like the Sleeping Giant, like the Lady of Shallott, like pieces of Osiris.
But it's you that has to jump.)
If you read this in a de Lint book, it'd be a spirit journey. If you read it in a Garth Nix book, it'd be Death. If I described to you how all these things connect in the back of my head, doubling in on each other, it'd be either New Age Bullshit (tm) or the beginnings of a story starting to pick up steam, little Katamari-idea-ball. This is the only level upon which I can really gut-deep relate to cyberpunk: the sheer amazing love of reaching out, feeling the strings of how imformation connects to each other both subtly and well, the webs of patterning and happenstance and coincidence and enemy action that we sit in every day and don't see until we squint just right.
So I have something old and something new, and something borrowed, and while my girl Molly doesn't so much get blue when she informs me she's thinking about dying, it's more grey, that's close enough.
And then if all those things come together, one looks up after an hour and finds oneself writing.
